Going that little bit further than the competition to tip the pitch odds

In 2005 a flagging Japanese economy convinced Takashi Hashiyama, president of the electronics firm Maspro Denkoh, to sell the corporate collection of French impressionist paintings. This included a major Cezanne landscape and lesser works by Sisley, van Gogh, and Picasso. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s gave presentations to Hashiyama touting their expertise and ability to achieve the highest auction prices. In Hashiyama’s judgment, the presentations were equally convincing. To settle the matter, he proposed a game of rock, paper, scissors.

“The client was very serious about this,” Christie’s deputy chairman Jonathan Rendell said, “so we were very serious about it, too.” The money was serious, too. The Maspro Denkoh collection was valued at $20 million. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s quickly agreed to the game.

In contrast, Kanae Ishibashi, the president of Christie’s Japan, began researching RPS strategies on the Internet. You may or may not be surprised to learn that an awful lot has been written on the game. Ishibashi had a break when Nicholas Maclean, Christie’s director of impressionist and modern art, mentioned that his eleven-year-old twin daughters, Alice and Flora, played the game at school almost daily.

Alice’s advice was “Everybody knows you always start with scissors.” Flora seconded this, saying “Rock is way too obvious… Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest.”

Both girls also agreed that, in the event of a scissors-scissors tie, the next choice should be scissors again - precisely because “everybody expects you to choose rock.”

Ishibashi went into the meeting with this strategy, while the Sotheby’s rep went in with no strategy at all. The auction house people sat facing each other at a conference table, flanked by Maspro accountants. To avoid ambiguity, the players wrote their choices on a slip of paper. A Maspro executive opened the slips. Ishibashi had chosen scissors, and the Sotheby’s representative had chosen paper. Scissors cuts paper, and Christie’s won. In early May 2005, Christie’s auctioned the four paintings for $17.8m, earning the auction house a $1.9m commission.

The $1.9 million detail is delicious. Two august auction houses become impossible to separate, so the whole contest is decided by advice from a pair of eleven-year-olds about scissors.

Business likes to pretend decisions follow a dignified hierarchy: expertise first, evidence second, procurement appendix third. In reality, evenly matched choices often topple on something tiny and weird. One supplier remembers the obscure constraint. One candidate understands how the company earns money. One bidder reads the instructions all the way to the bottom. The grand contest ends on a loose shoelace.

This irritates people who believe merit should produce a clean ranking. Merit often produces a shortlist.

Once everybody left is competent, curiosity starts to matter disproportionately. Christie’s treated rock, paper, scissors as part of the job. Sotheby’s treated it as random nonsense. That difference was evidence: one side respected the client’s peculiar test enough to prepare.

Many buyers feel this before they can articulate it. Extra preparation signals what the relationship may feel like after the contract, when the polished answers have run out and some daft, urgent problem lands at 4.43pm. Care at the margin becomes a sample of future care.

Could the research have failed? Obviously. Scissors has no loyalty. The point is hardly that childish games contain a guaranteed strategy. It is that avoidable randomness deserves attention when the main competition has reached a draw.

There is always another layer: the awkward implementation question, the handover nobody owns, the tiny ritual important to the buyer, the moment after the impressive answer when someone asks, “Yes, but what happens on Monday?” Excellence gets you level. Then the apparently trivial thing becomes the whole bloody game.