The Infinite Game

by Simon Sinek

According to a study by McKinsey, the average life span of an S&P 500 company has dropped over forty years since the 1950s, from

average of sixty-one years to less than eighteen years today.15 And according to Professor Richard Foster of Yale University, the rate of change “is at a faster pace than ever.”16

Their work was not devoted to getting to the end of the siege; they were playing to keep the human race going for as long as possible.

“What’s this all for?”

The question that a Just Cause must answer is: What is the infinite and lasting vision that a moon shot will help advance?

Friedman seemed to have a very one-dimensional view of business. And as anyone who has ever led, worked for or bought from a business knows, business is dynamic and complicated. Which means, it is possible that, for the past 40+ years, we have been building companies with a definition of business that is actually bad for business and undermines the very system of capitalism it proclaims to embrace.

Some may say my view—that the purpose of a company is not just to make money but to pursue a Just Cause—is naïve and anticapitalist. First, I would urge us all to beware the messenger.

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.

Losing experienced staff and waiting for people to get trained and adjust to a new culture all affect productivity. Add in the low morale in high-turnover jobs, and it makes one curious whether the money saved was actually worth it. Ahrendts was curious too. So she ran the numbers. And what she discovered surprised even her. The actual incremental cost of Apple taking care of their people was: zero.

Trust is a feeling.

The most anxiety-inducing place to be is alone—where we feel we have to protect ourselves from the people on our own team. Real or perceived, when there is danger, we act from a place of fear rather than confidence. So just imagine how people act when they work in constant fear of missing out on a promotion, fear of getting in trouble, fear of being mocked, fear of not fitting in, fear of their boss thinking they’re an idiot, fear of finding themselves on a short list for the next round of layoffs.

Asi es cómo se siente Imogen.

If leaders are responsible for creating the environment that fosters trust, then are we building a bench of leaders who know how to do that?

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

When we apply finite-minded solutions to address an ethical fading problem that finite-minded thinking created, we get more ethical fading. When we use process and structure to fix cultural problems what we often get is more lying and cheating.

Leaders who give their people a Just Cause to advance and give them an opportunity to work with a Trusting Team to advance it will build a culture in which their people can work toward the short-term goals while also considering the morality, ethics and wider impact of the decisions they make to meet those goals. Not because they are told to. Not because there is a checklist that requires it. Not because they took the company’s online course on “acting ethically.” They did so because it’s the natural thing to do. We act ethically because we don’t want to do anything that would do damage to the advancement of the Just Cause. When we feel a part of a Trusting Team, we don’t want to let down our teammates. We feel accountable to our team and the reputation of the organization, not just to ourselves and our personal ambitions. When we feel part of a group that cares about us, we want to do right by that group and make our leaders proud. Our standards naturally rise. As

Ethical fading is a failure of leadership and is a controllable element in a corporate culture. Which means the opposite is also true. Cultures that are ethically strong are also a result of the culture the leaders build.

It’s not just about how much money they can make this year. “We plan to be here in the next one hundred years, so we think about long-term results,”

Management becomes disconnected from the people and trust breaks down. And when performance necessarily starts to suffer as a result, these same leaders are quicker to blame others than to look at what set the company on the new path in the first place. In order to “fix” the problem, their faith in the people is replaced with faith in the process. The company becomes more rigid and decision-making powers are often taken away from the front lines. It can’t be a good thing when the captain of the ship, who is supposed to be on deck navigating toward the horizon, is now in the ship tinkering with the engine trying to make it go faster.

Playing the Infinite Game is not a checklist, it’s a mindset.