The acronym “MTQ” stand for “Material”, “Time” and “Quality”. This is a metaphor taken from the book How Life Imitates Chess written by multiple time world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

In this article we are going to examine how online business imitates chess, but before we do let’s quickly go over some chess concepts.

In chess all pieces are assigned a “material” value, starting with pawn which has a value of one all the way up to the queen which has a value of nine (roughly equal in value to nine pawns). Usually when analyzing a chess game in progress, the first thing observing players will check is to see which player is up on material. This is the most basic method for beginning to determine which player is currently in the lead.

The next chess metric to consider is “time”. To explain this concept let’s imagine for a moment a game of chess where both sides have exactly the same amount of material, however one player has sent most of his pieces into key strategic positions while the other player has pieces still in their original position or in other less advantageous positions.

This often happens when one player is forced to move backward or forced to make weak moves to avoid loosing material. The end result being that the board almost looks as if one player passed and given up several turns to move. For this reasons in chess jargon people will often speak of which player is ahead in terms of “tempo” or “time” as it is often called.

The final factor in “MTV Analysis” is “quality”. To explain this concept lets examine the chess piece known as the bishop. These pieces moves diagonally across the board and is often considered to have a value of 3.5. Each player starts with two bishops one for the white squares and the other for the black ones. At no point in a game of chess can a white bishop come to occupy a black square.

Let’s now consider a game where each player only has one bishop left. We’ll say one player has a white bishop and the other a black bishop. If we imagine where pawns from one or both players have been arranged in diagonal chains (a structurally strong layout) on the white squares then the white bishop will be largely blocked from moving around the board freely. Assuming the black bishop does not have such obstacles, then in this game the black bishop is more powerful than the white bishop even though they are considered to have the same material value.

Now that we’ve covered the chess concepts let’s apply them to online business, starting with the concept of “material”. Such material could take many forms, for instance your domain name can be thought of as material. It’s value may come from several sources including keyword relevance, a brand recognition, or even gray hat equity such as being a common misspelling of a highly visited competitors domain. Additional we could consider things like email leads, website PageRank and monthly traffic as example of “material” in online business.

In the realm of online business the concept of “time” revolves totally around the idea of being able to take action more quickly then your competitors. If you have information that no one else has and you can use it to get a product to service to market before any of your competitors then you have an advantage in terms of “time”.

Production speed is another example of the time factor. If you have systems in place that will allow you to produce anything (new content, widgets, software, etc) at a faster rate then the competition you also have an advantage in terms of “time”.

Once again we have arrived at the metric of “quality”. Let’s say that you have just created and launched a first rate viral marketing campaign and that within the first 24 hours of launch the traffic to your site has skyrocketed! Let’s also say that this glut of traffic becomes too much for your hosting account and suddenly your site crashes. Every minute that your site remains down is a waist of the efforts of your viral campaign. If we consider the same viral campaign launched on a hosting account with greater bandwidth then that same campaign would suddenly have greater “quality”.

Another example of “quality” that I can think of comes from blogging. Imagine you have just written a first rate blog post. Let’s also say that you are planning to post it on a blog with a small readership and that you are a person with limited social bookmarking connections. The same post posted on a large blog with a large readership and ample social bookmarking connections will generate more value and therefore be of greater “quality” to your business. For a more in depth review of this last concept check out our post “The Power of Having a Platform”.

The idea of “MTQ Analysis” in chess and is easily applied to online business. The idea is that you always want to look for action steps that will allow you to take the “material”, “time” and “value” that you have now and apply it in such a way that the total equity of your business increases.