How to Win in Business: Choose Scissors

If you owned a $20 million dollar art collection, and you couldn't decide whether you should have Christie's or Sotheby's auction off your collection, how would you choose the winner? If you're Tashi Hashiyama, you have the two most prestigious auction houses in the world play Rock, Paper, Scissors, winner take all. As reported by Yahoo News:

Japanese art collector Tashi Hashiyama was unable to decide which of the prestigious auction houses should handle his collection, which featured works by Picasso, Van Gogh and Cezanne, and had them play "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to decide, Nicholas Maclean said.

"The way in which collections are won sometimes rest on the tiniest little decision, and the owner of this collection could not decide between the two big houses," said Maclean, Christie's international director for Impressionist and Modern Art.

Even more interestingly, apparently the Japanese use RPS to decide all kinds of important decisions:

"In Japan it is not uncommon that a decision will be made where this game will be played," [Maclean] said."When (Hashiyama) mentioned this, we were not surprised. We've heard this before and we took it very seriously and we started researching."

And how did they start researching? Well, Maclean asked his children, and they agreed that scissors was the way to go. Aren't you glad that you went to business school?

Note: For those of you who would like to get further involved in the world of Rock, Paper, Scissors, please check out the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Society. Their site contains basic RPS strategy, advanced RPS strategy and information about the 2005 International RPS Championship. Good stuff.

Also, check out the fantastic trailer for Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Movie, due out some time this year (you need to have quicktime installed).