‘ CHOOSING T O BE COME AN INFINITE LEADER WILL SHAKE Y OUR W ORLD’
For organisations ranging from Disney to the United Nations, Simon Sinek is the go-to guru for insights on how to inspire trust, co-operation and positive change. In an exclusive interview, the author of bestseller Start With Why urges business leaders to ditch short-termism and start playing ‘the infinite game’
Interview Hannah Gresty Portrait Robert Ascroft
I
n September 2009, a then-unknown Simon Sinek went in front of a modest audience at a TEDx
conference on the outskirts of Seattle to speak about the power of purpose in business. That talk has since clocked up more than 45 million online views. Over the past decade, Sinek’s incisive assessments of everything from the value of trust to the problems facing millennials have earned him an avid following in the business world. Indeed, when Director interviewed all winners of the IoD Director of the Year Awards last year, more than a third of them cited him as an inspirational figure. At the time of his meeting with
Director, the author of bestsellers Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last is poised to launch The Infinite Game. Sinek’s latest treatise expounds on his observation that business leaders too often focus on arbitrary, short-term targets. In this exclusive interview, he draws on game theory to explain why leaders need to adopt an “infinite mindset” – and, crucially, how to do it – if their ventures are to continue thriving long after they have gone.
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director.co.uk
What inspired you to apply game theory to your take on leadership? There’s a way in which business is conducted today that makes me and many others feel uncomfortable – namely: the way leaders act, their priorities and how they treat their people. I’d become tired of people in positions of power telling me that I was naive or that I didn’t understand how business works whenever I said that something needed to change. And then I discovered Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, an emeritus professor at New York University. The ideas that this book introduced explained my discomfort.
What are finite and infinite games? A finite game is one in which there are known players, fixed rules and agreed objectives – the main one being to win. Take football: we know who the players are; we all agree on its laws; and there’s always a beginning, middle and end. With an infinite game, some of the players are unknown, the rules are unfixed and the main objective is to perpetuate the game in order to keep playing it for as long as possible.
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