SIMON SINEK
There is no such thing as winning an infinite game, since it has no end. It occurred to me that business meets the criteria of an infinite game.
So business is a no-win game?
That’s right. You can’t win in business. You won’t always know who your competitors are – anyone can join the market at any time and they can all do business in whatever way they want. Yet, if you listen to the language of so many leaders, they talk about “‘beating the competition”, which is impossible when the game is infinite. So it turns out that the people who were saying that I was naive are the ones who are naive. It turns out that the world isn’t flat, despite what we’ve been told.
Why do many business leaders have the finite mindset that you describe?
The fragility of their egos plays into it – humans like to win. But also the balance of business philosophy has tipped too far in the wrong direction over the past 30 or 40 years. In the 1970s the influential economist Milton Friedman
‘TO SAY THAT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS IS TO MAXIMISE PROFIT IS TO MISUNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF BUSINESS’
theorised that the responsibility of business was to maximise profit [by any means necessary] within the bounds of the law. When you think about it, that’s a very low standard. What about ethics? Then we started to see decisions that over-indexed profit above all – for instance, the use of mass redundancies to cut costs. That was unheard of before the 1980s. Now it’s standard – someone is laid off because their company missed an arbitrary revenue target. Taking that person’s livelihood away because we didn’t make as much money as we wanted is insane. To say that the responsibility of business is to maximise profit is to misunderstand the value of business.
What are the main risks of finite-minded leadership? Business leaders who prioritise winning above all else are focused on achieving near-term results. When this happens, they instinctively respond to known factors instead of exploring unknown possibilities. In some cases, leaders are so absorbed in what their competition is doing that they’re blind to opportunities to strengthen their organisations. Reducing investment in R&D, growing through acquisition and extreme cost-cutting are all favoured options. As a result, businesses see a decline in innovation, co-operation and trust over time.
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Today the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company is under 18 years, compared with 61 years in the 1950s. Although there are many reasons for this decline, we have to acknowledge that too many leaders are building companies that aren’t made to last.
So what is the responsibility of business? One of the practices of infinite-minded leadership is advancing a just cause. This is about building a world we want to live in. The pressures that society puts on us and we often put on ourselves are finite: how rich are you? How much power do you have? How fast is your business growing? Of course, we all have targets and deadlines. That’s fine, but if you hit these you still have to keep striving towards something for the rest of your life.
Who in business would you say has a just cause? The example of Sir Richard Branson and Virgin is probably overused, but it’s a good one. I once sat next to Branson at a dinner and took the chance to ask him: “What have you done at Virgin that you would like to be your legacy?” He got sort of annoyed at me and replied: “If you want to judge my life, judge me by the quality of my children.” One of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs takes more pride in how he’s raised his children than in how he’s built a great business. It’s this infinite mentality – that “my life lives beyond me” – that’s helped him to build a remarkable company that will endure.
The value of trust is a recurring theme in your work. What role does it play in a firm’s longevity? We have an unbalanced assessment of employees that values performance above trustworthiness. This is a bit like choosing a mate according to their looks and not their character. If you evaluate employee performance and
PHOTO COURTESY OF WORKHUMAN
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