The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

“The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.”

In a nutshell, Smith accepted that it was human nature for people to act to advance their own interests. He called our propensity for self-interest the “invisible hand.” He went on to theorize that because the invisible hand was a universal truth (because of our selfish motivations we all want to build strong companies), it ultimately benefits the consumer.

It was only after Friedman’s 1970 article that executives and directors started to see themselves as responsible to their “owners,” the shareholders, and not stewards of something bigger.

“Without a sense of purpose,” he explained, “no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.

The stock market works at its best when it works as it was intended, to allow for the average person to share in the wealth of the nation.

The American colonists chose to revolt only after years of appealing for change. Begging for it. They were only partially drawn to revolution for ideological reasons.

they saw their lives and their economic well-being suffering or restricted as a result of a gross imbalance of power and wealth. The vision of an alternative future came later.

People want to be treated fairly and share in the wealth they helped produce in payment for the cost they bear to grow their companies. I am not demanding it—they are!

A definition that understands that money is a result and not a purpose.

the definition of the responsibility of business must:

Advance a purpose:

Protect people:

Generate profit:

The responsibility of business is to use its will and resources to advance a cause greater than itself, protect the people and places in which it operates and generate more resources so that it can continue doing all those things for as long as possible. An organization can do whatever it likes to build its business so long as it is responsible for the consequences of its actions.

And both in nations and in companies, everyone wants the opportunity to work hard and earn an income so that we may provide for ourselves and our families.

We are all entitled to feel psychologically protected at work, be fairly compensated for our effort and contribute to something bigger than ourselves. These are our unalienable rights.

“How do I create an environment in which my people can work to their natural best?”

It’s not the people doing the job, it’s the people who lead the people doing the job who can make the greater difference.

How a leader lists their priorities reveals their bias.

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.

Unlike resources, which are ultimately limited, we can generate an endless supply of will.

There is a difference between a group of people who work together and a group of people who trust each other.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated, excited, angry, inspired, confused, a sense of camaraderie, envious, confident or insecure while at work, then congratulations, you’re human.

Performance is about technical competence.

It’s the difference between physical safety and psychological safety.

is a toxic team member.

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?

This was his chance to prove what can happen to a police force with a culture built on trust, not tickets written, blind obedience or job insecurity.

A Circle of Safety is a necessary condition for trust to exist. It describes an environment in which people feel psychologically safe to be vulnerable around their colleagues.

Fear is such a powerful motivator that it can force us to act in ways that are completely counter to our own or our organization’s best interests.

To help them feel safe from humiliation, for example, he depersonalized the problems his executives faced. “You have a problem,” he would tell them.6 “You are not the problem.”

To do this, however, he knew that he would need to change the way that he recognized and rewarded his people.

People will trust their leaders when their leaders do the things that make them feel psychologically safe.

Police can never “beat” crime.

The ability to succeed is not what makes someone a leader.

Exhibiting the qualities of leadership is what makes someone an effective leader. Qualities like honesty, integrity, courage, resiliency, perseverance, judgment and decisiveness, as the Marines have learned after years of trial and error, are more likely to engender the kind of trust and cooperation that, over the course of time, increase the likelihood that a team will succeed more often than it fails.

The Marine Corps isn’t interested in whether or not leaders can cross a water hazard or any other arbitrary obstacle. They are interested in training leaders who can create an environment in which everyone feels trusted and trusting so that they can work together to overcome any obstacle.

leaders are not responsible for the results, leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.

And the best way to drive performance in an organization is to create an environment in which information can flow freely, mistakes can be highlighted and help can be offered and received. In short, an environment in which people feel safe among their

They build high-performing teams by prioritizing an individual’s trustworthiness over their ability to perform.

When leaders are willing to prioritize trust over performance, performance almost always follows. However, when leaders have laser-focus on performance above all else, the culture inevitably suffers.

As discussed in the previous chapters, cultures that place excessive focus on quarterly or annual financial performance can put intense pressure on people to cut corners, bend rules and make other questionable decisions in order to hit the targets set for them.

They will lose perspective and rationalize their ethical transgressions. “I gotta put food on the table,” “It’s what management wants,” “I have no choice,” and my personal favorite, “It’s the industry standard,” are all rationalizations we tell ourselves or tell others to help us mitigate any sense of guilt or responsibility we may feel.

So not only can leaders who oversee cultures in which ethical fading happens go unpunished, they can actually profit from it … which incentivizes leaders to maintain the status quo.

(As an aside, accountability is when we take responsibility for our own actions, not when we blame our actions on the system.)

According to social scientists who study the phenomenon of ethical fading, those who commit such violations of trust aren’t evil, but they do suffer from self-deception.

We humans have all sorts of clever ways to rationalize our behavior and deceive ourselves into thinking that the ethically questionable decisions we make are fair and justified, even though a reasonable person would view our actions as quite the opposite.

One of the ways we are able to deceive ourselves comes from the words we use.

The words we choose can help us distance ourselves from any sense of responsibility.

disassociate themselves from the impact of their decisions.