A Master's degree with a minor in Chess

If you want to earn an MBA from Virginia's Hampton University you're going to have to learn to play chess.

Chess is more than fun to first-year students in Hampton's five-year MBA program. It's part of the curriculum. A third of the course Critical Analysis and Strategy is devoted to learning and playing it.

After experimenting with chess in business administration classes for more than a decade, [Sid Howard] Credle[, dean of Hampton University's business school,] formally incorporated it in 2000 into the new MBA program, whose graduates finish with both bachelor's and master's degrees.

The game is a way to teach critical thinking and strategic skills in a dynamic environment.

Just as in, well, the business world.

So who is this Sid Credle guy?

...a past national champion in one of the lower ratings...

Here's his USCF rating card. It's hard to tell from his tournament history where the "past national champion" title came from. Though if you'd like to meet Sid, it looks like you'd have a pretty good shot at it at this year's Foxwoods Open.

Corporate Tactics

From "Icahn will do whatever it takes to win" at the Chicago Sun Times:

Author Mark Stevens has some advice for Motorola executives about corporate activist and multibillionaire Carl Icahn, the subject of his 1993 biography, King Icahn:
....
• Brush up on your chess. "Icahn was a top chess player at Princeton. He will do whatever it takes to win. He will surprise. He will come back from the dead. He will not go away until he wins. Motorola management is on the second move in the game, but Carl is already on his 10th."
....
• Even if you think you're a crack chess player, chances are Icahn will have his way and will win. "He almost always takes the value of the shares he bought and drives them up," Stevens said.