The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

Great leaders set up their organizations to succeed beyond their own lifetimes, and when they do, the benefits—for us, for business and even for the shareholder—are extraordinary.

Finite games are played by known players.

In finite games, there is always a beginning, a middle and an end.

Infinite games,

In an infinite game, the primary objective is to keep playing, to perpetuate the game.

There is no such thing as coming in first in marriage or friendship, for example.

matter how successful we are in life, when we die, none of us will be declared the winner of life. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things are journeys, not events.

When we lead with a finite mindset in an infinite game, it leads to all kinds of problems, the most common of which include the decline of trust, cooperation and innovation.

Which means, 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.

the infinite-minded leader works to ensure that their employees, customers and shareholders remain inspired to continue contributing with their effort, their wallets and their investments.

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.

Because finite-minded leaders place unbalanced focus on near-term results, they often employ

The more likely scenario is a general decline in trust, cooperation and innovation in an organization, all of which make it vastly more difficult to survive and thrive in a fast-moving

If we believe trust, cooperation and innovation matter to the long-term prospects of our organizations, then we have only one choice—to learn how to play with an infinite mindset.

There are three factors we must always consider when deciding how we want to lead:

Any leader who wants to adopt an infinite mindset must follow five essential practices:

Advance a Just Cause

Build Trustin...

Study your Worth...

Prepare for Existential F...

Demonstrate the Coura...

The motivation to play in an infinite game is completely different—the goal is not to win, but to keep playing.

A Just Cause is a specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.

It describes the world we hope to live in and will commit to help build.

Think of the WHY like the foundation of a house, it is the starting point.

A Just Cause is what inspires us to want to keep playing.

an affirmative and tangible vision of the ideal future state they imagine.

Just Cause must be:

Imagine if instead of fighting against poverty, for example, we fought for the right of every human to provide for their own family.

not inspired to “reduce” poverty, we are inspired to “grow” the number of people who are able to provide for themselves and their families. Being for or being against is a subtle but profound difference that the writers of the Declaration of Independence intuitively understood. Those who led America toward independence stood against Great Britain in the short term. Indeed the American colonists were deeply offended by how they were treated by England. Over 60 percent of the Declaration of Independence is spent laying out specific grievances against the king. However, the Cause they were fighting for was the true source of lasting inspiration, and in the Declaration of Independence it came before anything else. It is the first idea we read in the document. It sets the context for the rest of the Declaration and the direction for moving forward. It is the ideal to which we personally relate and that we have easily committed to memory. Few Americans, except for scholars and the most zealous of history buffs, can rattle off even one of the complaints listed later in the document, things like: “He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” In contrast, most Americans can recite with ease “all men are created equal” and can usually rattle off the three tenets of “Life, Libe...

For a Just Cause to pass the service-orientation test, the primary benefit of the organization’s contributions must always go to people other than the contributors themselves.

If there is only one party, if we are the sole beneficiaries of our work, that’s not a Just Cause, that’s a vanity project.

Markets will rise and fall, people will come and go, technologies will evolve, products and services will adapt to consumer tastes and market demands.

It is important to celebrate our victories, but we cannot linger on them. For the Infinite Game is still going and there is still much work to be done. Those victories must serve as milestones of our progress toward an idealized future.

This is what the idealized journey of a Just Cause feels like—no matter how much we have achieved, we always feel we have further to go.

“We choose to go to the moon,” said President John F. Kennedy with determination.1 “We choose to go to the moon in this decade … not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to

organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” And just over eight years after Kennedy first challenged the nation, Neil Armstrong took “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Kennedy’s moon shot was made in the context of the larger infinite vision that America’s Founding Fathers laid out—that our progress is not for the benefit of a few, but for the benefit of many.

Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be “better.” “Better” suggests a journey of constant improvement and makes us feel like we are being invited to contribute our talents and energies to make progress in that journey. “Better,” in the Infinite Game, is better than “best.”

Money is the fuel to advance a Cause, it is not a Cause itself.

A strong culture and the ability to fund its own existence (also known as profitability) is how a company actually stays in the game for the long term. In addition,

To offer growth as a cause, growth for its own sake, is like eating just to get fat.

When we have a Just Cause, we are willing to sacrifice our interests to advance it.

At the end of his life, Walton described his vision this way: “If we work together, we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone … we’ll give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and have a better life.”

Words matter. They give direction and meaning to things. Pick the wrong words, intentions change and things won’t necessarily go as hoped or expected.

This means that we need to stop seeing the CEO as number one and the CFO or COO as number two and start thinking of them as vital partners in a common cause.

When his new position was announced in 2013, McMillon said in a press release, “The opportunity to lead Walmart is a great privilege.7 Our company has a rich history of delivering value to customers across the globe and, as their needs grow and change, we will be there to serve them. Our management team is talented and experienced, and our strategy gives me confidence that our future is bright. By keeping our promise to customers, we will drive shareholder value, create opportunity for our associates and grow our business.” McMillon presented his priorities in literally the exact opposite order that Mike Duke had when he stepped up to lead the company five years earlier. McMillon put Sam Walton’s vision first.

In fact, the rise of this kind of shortsightedness over the past 50 years can be traced back to the philosophies of a single person. In a watershed article from 1970, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, who is considered one of the great theorists of today’s form of capitalism, laid out the foundation for the theory of shareholder primacy that is at the heart of so much finite-minded business practice today. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” he wrote, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business.1 He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” Indeed, Friedman insisted that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”2 In other words, according to Friedman, the sole purpose of business is to make money and that money belongs to shareholders. These ideas are now firmly ingrained in the zeitgeist. Today it is so generally accepted that the “owner” of a company sits at the top of the benefit food chain and that business exists solely to create wealth, that we often assume that this was always the way that the game of business ...