The Infinite Game
There was a time when Enron Corp. was considered one of the best corporations in the world. It was voted “most innovative” six years in a row by People Magazine. In 1999, the executive committee of Enron Corp. was conducting creative vision sessions to select a new slogan for the company. Enron was on a roll, entering new markets and growing in existing ones. But the old motto, “The world’s leading energy company,” was no longer working for them. Their top choice for a replacement was “World’s coolest company.” When asked by a reporter about their vision, Enron’s President at that time, Jeffrey K. Skilling, said, “It’s a vision of innovation; it’s a vision of creativity.” They even considered wrapping the headquarters building in a pair of giant sunglasses. For Enron, it was all about winning. Everything else came second. Today, the name Enron is synonymous with greed, ego, and win-at-all-cost mindset. Winning is a reasonably standard goal for an organization, of course. And a good one. But how you define “winning” makes all the difference in how your people work to achieve it. Most importantly, how individual values, beliefs, and culture manifest themselves through actions.
In his book, The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek applies game theory to explore how we look at winning and losing. He describes the difference between finite and infinite games and how the winning for these two types of games is different. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning — an infinite game to stay in the game. If we look at the National Basketball Association (NBA) as an example, we’ll see this idea in the application. Professional Basketball is both a Finite and an Infinite Game. Every season, 30 professional NBA teams play a series of 82 games. These are finite games. There are winners and losers of each game. Teams hire and fire coaches and players, develop tactics and innovative strategies, and do their best to win as many games as possible. All teams play by agreed-upon rules, rules enforced with a high level of scrutiny, with multiple referees and video replay to ensure that players conform to the rules. Teams do everything they can to win. Enough victories in the regular season, and a team can move on to the playoffs, another series of finite games. In the end, there is an annual NBA Champion.
For teams and fans, each season is a finite game. But from the standpoint of the National Basketball Association, basketball itself is an infinite game. Their objective isn’t to win or lose games, but to make sure that all 30 teams have enough financial success to return next season. Using mechanisms like salary caps, TV revenue sharing, and the player draft system, the league tries to “level the playing field.” It’s in no one’s best interest to have a team fail and go out of business. Players of an infinite game continually adjust the rules to prevent that result.
There is no winning in infinite games. The objective is to continue playing the game. Leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, says Sinek, will eventually build stronger, more innovative, and more inspiring organizations with the resilience to thrive in an ever-changing world.
When you put a finite player against a finite player, the system is stable. When you pit an infinite player versus an infinite player, the system is also stable. Problems arise when you put a finite player against an infinite player. The finite player is playing to win, and an infinite player is playing to keep playing. As a result, they will make very different strategic choices.
The conflict in the Balkans is another example of a finite and infinite game. The Balkans have historically been the key battlefield between Islam and European civilization since the battle at Kosovo, where the Ottoman Turks clashed with the Serbs in 1389, to the present. At its apex, the Islamic tide reached and was stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683. The Ottoman Empire was finally pushed out in the Balkan War of 1912 when the combined armies of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria were stopped at the Gates of Istanbul by the intervention of the great European powers of that period. Why did they do that? Perhaps they knew that they were playing an infinite game. Balkans were under the Ottoman Empire rule for almost 500 years. The conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s was a continuation of this infinite game between religions. However, a lot of people, especially the leaders, during the civil war in Yugoslavia, had a win-at-all-cost mindset and saw these wars as a finite game that they needed to win. The current living conditions in the former Yugoslavian countries such as Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro were caused by people stubbornly holding on to centuries-old grudges and limited mindsets. All of our actions reflect the mindset behind them.
In September of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that many Volkswagen cars being sold in America had a “defeat device” or software in diesel engines that could detect when they were being tested, changing the performance accordingly to improve results. The German car giant has since admitted cheating emissions tests and said that they suffered from a limited mindset. The bad news for Volkswagen is that a limited mindset, one that’s distorted or out-of-touch, can point people to do things they absolutely shouldn’t do. The good news for all of us is that we can evolve our values, beliefs, and mindsets, including our understanding of “winning.” When we do that, we can foster entirely different choices and create very different results. However, changing mindsets and cultures is not easy. In May 2017, Volkswagen CEO Matthias Mueller, said during a discussion with business representatives, “I don’t know whether you can imagine how difficult it is to change the mindset.”
Over the past few decades, global corporations have been hit by scandals, and it mostly boils down to individual values, beliefs, and culture. Many have reported stories about behaviors that defy great organizational culture, such as employees falsifying records to help their bosses during the Enron scandal. Or how supervisors were helping their subordinates by overlooking coworkers rule-breaking during the JP Morgan scandals that ranged from dubious recruiting forays in China, manipulation of electricity markets, to paying billions related to the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Then there was a wide-ranging scandal involving FIFA. The Department of Justice indicted 14 high-ranking soccer officials on racketeering and corruption charges that eventually engulfed organization head Sepp Blatter, who announced his resignation. Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, was pilloried for jacking up the price of a drug used by HIV patients by 5,000% to $750 a pill. He would eventually be arrested for securities fraud involving his activities at another company.
Wells Fargo’s aggressive sales tactics led to the creation of millions of fake customer accounts. The grueling testimonies from CEO John Stumpf, coupled with insights from my industry-wide research into the culture and mindsets of bankers, suggest a win-at-all-cost mindset of senior leaders at Wells Fargo. Along with fixing the sales culture, the bank will have to address these critical mindset gaps to prevent the next scandal.
Many athletes have this a win-at-all-cost mindset. Each year, thousands of athletes are suspended for cheating. Tennis star Maria Sharapova tested positive for a banned substance and was suspended from the professional tennis tour for nine months. This limited mindset is also present everywhere. In 2019, there was a college admissions scandal, in which Hollywood stars and other wealthy families paid thousands of dollars to get their kids into colleges. The biggest and most deadly scandal in the 2010s was the one that involved Boeing 737 Max. Messages obtained by The New York Times showed Boeing officials knew about severe problems in its 737 Max plane years before the crashes, which claimed the lives of nearly 350 people.
Tony Hseih, CEO of the online shoe retailer Zappos, once famously said that he didn’t know anything about shoes, but knew a lot about creating workplace culture. Zappos has a well-defined recruitment and induction process called the Zappos Family New Hire Program. It’s not a rubber-stamping probation period, but values fit assessment. Every new hire, regardless of role or department, goes through the four-week program, which combines technical training and culture immersion. In the end, the employee has full knowledge of what the organization stands for and how it does business, and the organization can assess the mindset of the individual and how he or she can contribute to Zappos’ values.
No leader, no matter how smart they are, will be able to enable alignment in an organization that thinks it’s playing the finite game and has a win-at-all-costs mindset. With a finite game mindset, we are self-focused. We see only our own needs, challenges, and objectives. By contrast, an infinite game culture enables all to envision and pursue a collective result. With an infinite game mindset, people focus on achieving their long term goals in context, with a clear understanding not only of how their actions contribute to collective results but also how they are impacting others’ abilities to contribute.
As a leader, you need to spearhead the shift to an infinite mindset by focusing on the collective result, your role in it, and how you’re impacting others. As you honestly hold yourself accountable for your impact on others, you model that change, and walking the walk will invite people to change their mindsets.
Too often, people in organizations primarily identify around their separate, individual roles. With an infinite game mindset, teams and team members break free from the constraints of self-focus and can see options that would not otherwise occur to them. The basic ways they see the world are different: with a finite game mindset, people tend to see each other as objects; with an infinite game mindset, they see each other as people. Instead of acting in ways calculated to benefit or justify themselves, they take into account their impact on others and adjust their efforts to be more helpful. They consider others needs and act in ways that further the collective results they are committed to achieving.
Playing in the infinite game of business is about evolving our mindset. It’s the value of continuous learning. It’s the value of speaking to people inside and outside of your industry around what’s coming and how to stay relevant. It’s easy to slip up in the infinite game. It’s easy to become finite minded. It’s easy to focus on the expedient, especially when there’s pressure from people inside and outside of our organizations. Together is better. Get ready and play the infinite game.
