The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

A signpost stands at a fork in the road. Pointing in one direction, the sign says “Victory.” Pointing in another direction, the sign says “Fulfillment.” We must pick a direction. Which one will we choose? If we choose the path to Victory, the goal is to win! We will experience the thrill of competition as we rush toward the finish line. Crowds gather to cheer for us! And then it’s over. And everyone goes home. (Hopefully we can do it again) If we choose the path to Fulfillment,

The journey will be long. There will be times in which we must watch our step There will be times we can stop to enjoy the view we keep going. we keep going. Crowds gather to join us on the journey. And when our lives are over, those who joined us on the path to Fulfillment will keep going without us and inspire others to join them too.

We did these things not because of the promise of an end-of-year bonus; we did these things because we felt like we were contributing to something bigger than ourselves, something with value that would last well beyond our own lifetimes.

As human beings we are naturally inclined to seek out immediate solutions to uncomfortable problems and prioritize quick wins to advance our ambitions. We tend to see the world in terms of successes and failures, winners and losers. This default win-lose mode can sometimes work for the short term; however, as a strategy for how companies and organizations operate, it can have grave consequences over the longer term. The results of this default mindset are all too familiar: annual rounds of mass layoffs to meet arbitrary projections, cutthroat work environments, subservience to the shareholder over the needs of employees and customers, dishonest and unethical business practices, rewarding high-performing toxic team members while turning a blind eye to the damage they are doing to the rest of the team and rewarding leaders who seem to care a lot more about themselves than those in their charge.

It is well within our power to build a world in which the vast majority of us wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the day.

In the Infinite Game, the true value of an organization cannot be measured by the success it has achieved based on a set of arbitrary metrics over arbitrary time frames. 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.

The United States assumed the Vietnam War was finite because most wars are, indeed, finite. In most wars there is a land grab or some other easy to measure finite objective. If the combatants enter the war with clear political objectives, whoever achieves their finite objective first will be declared victor, a treaty will be signed and the war will end. But that’s not always the case. Had America’s leaders paid closer attention, perhaps they would have recognized the true nature of the Vietnam War sooner.

The choice to lead with an infinite mindset is less like preparing for a football game and more like the decision to get into shape. There is no one thing we can do in order to get into shape. We can’t simply go to the gym for nine hours and expect to be in shape. However, if we go to the gym every single day for twenty minutes, we will absolutely get into shape. Consistency becomes more important than intensity. The problem is, no one knows exactly when we will see results. In fact, different people will show results at different times. But without question, 100 percent, we all know it will work. And though we may have finite fitness goals we want to reach, if we want to be as healthy as possible, the lifestyle we adopt matters more than whether or not we hit our goal on the arbitrary dates we set. With any health regime, there are certain things we have to do—eat more vegetables, work out on a regular basis and get enough sleep, for example. Adopting an infinite mindset is exactly the same.

It’s too easy for Garmin to simply blame the rise and ubiquity of smartphones to explain their losses (which they did). What they failed to recognize is that they had a vision statement that directed them to focus on their product, and in so doing, they missed the opportunity that smartphones offered them. Had they been obsessing about how to provide the value to customers first, they may have seized the chance to develop the go-to navigation app for mobile phones when the opportunity still existed. Their brand was certainly strong enough to do so. Instead, they continued to focus on the business model they had selling dash-mounted hardware. Now the default navigation apps on our phones are Google Maps, Waze or Apple Maps, but that didn’t have to be. A Just Cause should direct the business model, not the other way around.

When a statement of vision or mission is grounded in the product, it can have adverse effects on the corporate culture also. For companies that place their product above all else, which is fairly common among technology or engineering companies, it leaves people who are not engineers or product designers feeling like (and sometimes actually treated like) second-class citizens in their own companies. An organization is better served if everyone, including those in accounting, support or customer service roles, for example, is made to feel like they are not just there to serve the needs of the engineers or product development teams.

It’s a strange quirk of human nature. The order in which a person presents information more often than not reveals their actual priorities and the focus of their strategies.

So it begs the question, what exactly is a Chief EXECUTIVE Officer? The lack of a clear standard for the role and responsibilities of the CEO in our organizations is one of the reasons we find too many leaders of companies playing the finite game when they should at least be thinking about the Infinite Game. In too many cases, it’s that their title hasn’t properly set them up for the job they have. The word “executive” doesn’t tell us what a CEO is responsible for.

Leaders in the Infinite Game will be better equipped to fulfill their responsibilities if they understand that they are stepping into the role of a “Chief Vision Officer,” or CVO. That is the primary job of the person who sits at the pointy end of the spear. They are the holder, communicator and protector of the vision. Their job is to ensure that all clearly understand the Just Cause and that all other C-level executives direct their efforts to advancing the Cause inside the organization.

Where a finite-minded leader sees fast growth as the goal, an infinite-minded leader views growth as an adjustable variable. Sometimes it is important to strategically slow the rate of growth to help ensure the security of the long-term or simply to make sure the organization is properly equipped to withstand the additional pressures that come with high-speed growth.

In order to increase the infinite value to our nation, our economy and all the companies that play in the game, the definition of the responsibility of business must: Advance a purpose: Offer people a sense of belonging and a feeling that their lives and their work have value beyond the physical work. Protect people: Operate our companies in a way that protects the people who work for us, the people who buy from us and the environments in which we live and work. Generate profit: Money is fuel for a business to remain viable so that it may continue to advance the first two priorities.

Noah’s managers at the Four Seasons understand that their job is to set an environment for Noah in which he can naturally thrive.

Infinite-minded leaders, in contrast, work hard to look beyond the financial pressures of the current day and put people before profit as often as possible. In hard times, they are less likely to look at their people as just another expense to be cut and more willing to explore other ways to save money, even if the results may take longer to realize. The infinite-minded leader may opt for furloughs instead of layoffs to help manage the resources; for example, requiring every employee to take two or three weeks of unpaid time off. Though people may be asked to sacrifice some money, everyone keeps their job. When a group shares in the suffering, it actually brings a team together.

When we are not on a Trusting Team, when we do not feel like we can express any kind of vulnerability at work, we often feel forced to lie, hide and fake to compensate. We hide mistakes, we act as if we know what we’re are doing (even when we don’t) and we would never admit we need help for fear of humiliation, reprisal or finding ourselves on a short list at the next round of layoffs. Without Trusting Teams, all the cracks in an organization are hidden or ignored. Which, if that continues for any length of time, will compound and spread until things start to break. Trusting Teams, therefore, are essential to the smooth running of any organization.

The SEALs would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust (it’s a relative scale), on their team than the high performer of low trust. If the SEALs, who are some of the highest-performing teams in the world, prioritize trust before performance, then why do we still think performance matters first in business?

frat-boy humor. But to Officer Coyle it was much more serious. Their behavior toward him left him feeling no sense of trust or psychological safety within the department. It got to the point that he hated coming to work. He just wanted to get through his shift and go home. More and more, he was thinking about picking up and starting over somewhere else; he was already looking into a transfer to a different police department.

The most anxiety-inducing place to be is alone—where we feel we have to protect ourselves from the people on our own team.

Mulally had learned some tricks to help build trust on the team. To help them feel safe from humiliation, for example, he depersonalized the problems his executives faced. “You have a problem,” he would tell them. “You are not the problem.”

to most of us, it is so ingrained in the way we think that we automatically adopt an “us” against “them” attitude whenever there are other players in the field, regardless of the nature of the game. If we are a player in an infinite game, however, we have to stop thinking of other players as competitors to be beaten and start thinking of them as Worthy Rivals who can help us become better players. A Worthy Rival is another player in the game worthy of comparison. Worthy Rivals may be players in our industry or outside our industry. They may be our sworn enemies, our sometimes collaborators or colleagues. It doesn’t even matter whether they are playing with a finite or an infinite mindset, so long as we are playing with an infinite mindset. Regardless of who they are or where we find them, the main point is that they do something (or many things) as well as or better than us. They may make a superior product, command greater loyalty, are better leaders or act with a clearer sense of purpose than we do. We don’t need to admire everything about them, agree with them or even like them. We simply acknowledge that they have strengths and abilities from which we could learn a thing or two.

(Fun fact: In an infinite game, we can both succeed. Turns out people can actually buy more than one book.) An infinite mindset embraces abundance whereas a finite mindset operates with a scarcity mentality. In the Infinite Game we accept that “being the best” is a fool’s errand and that multiple players can do well at the same time.

Because Mulally saw the other makers as Worthy Rivals, he actually endorsed the bailout. He knew that keeping those companies around would only serve to help make Ford a better company. He also knew that Ford’s rivals were part of a larger ecosystem. If they went bankrupt, so would many of the suppliers. Which could also destroy Ford. So Mulally put together plans to also help many of the auto suppliers weather the downturn. Unfortunately, the leaders of the troubled GM and Chrysler, still operating with a finite mindset, rejected Ford’s request to work together for the good of the industry. In contrast, Honda, Toyota and Nissan did work with Ford to help keep major suppliers, on which they also relied, in business. The infinite-minded players understood that the best option for their own survival, and indeed the ultimate goal of an infinite leader, is to keep the game in play.