The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

to succeed in the Infinite Game of business, we have to stop thinking about who wins or who’s the best and start thinking about how to build organizations that are strong enough and healthy enough to stay in the game for many generations to come.

The true value of an organization is measured by the desire others have to contribute to that organization’s ability to keep succeeding, not just during the time they are there, but well beyond their own tenure.

Players with an infinite mindset want to leave their organizations in better shape than they found them.

Where a finite-minded player makes products they think they can sell to people, the infinite-minded player makes products that people want to buy. The former is primarily focused on how the sale of those products benefits the company; the latter is primarily focused on how the products benefit those who buy them.

A Just Cause is not the same as our WHY. A WHY comes from the past. It is an origin story. It is a statement of who we are—the sum total of our values and beliefs.

A Just Cause is about the future.

The Just Cause provides the context for all the finite games we must play along the way.

Capitalism is about more than prosperity (measured in features and benefits, dollars and cents); it’s also about progress (measured in quality of life, technological advancements and the ability of the human race to live and work together in peace).

leader present their priorities . . . and it often looks something like this: 1. Growth. 2. Our customers. 3. Our people. Though that leader will insist that they do

care about their people (“our people” is one of their priorities), the order in which they appear on the list matters. In this case, there are at least two things that are considered more important than the people, and one of them is resources. How a leader lists their priorities reveals their bias.

Too many leaders “see people as a cost,”

“Why invest in people who aren’t gonna stick around?”

When companies make their people feel like they matter, the people come together in a way that money simply cannot buy.

Money can buy a lot of things. Indeed, we can motivate people with money; we can pay them to work hard. But money can’t buy true will.

focused on her Cause, it is as if she has forgotten that there are other points of view in the world

Our lives are finite, but life is infinite. We are the finite players in the infinite game of life. We come and go, we’re born and we die, and life still continues with us or without us. There are other players, some of them are our rivals, we enjoy wins and we suffer losses, but we can always keep playing tomorrow (until we run out of the ability to stay in the game).

In any other game, we get two choices. Though we do not get to choose the rules of the game, we do get to choose if we want to play and we get to choose how we want to play. The game of life is a little different. In this game, we only get one choice. Once we are born, we are players. The only choice we get is if we want to play with a finite mindset or an infinite mindset.