The Name of the Game

Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on August 12, 2020.

Before we get started, here’s a quick heads up that we now have all the up to date details on the 2020 LIVE2LEAD:Harrisonburg events posted at www.L2L-Harrisonburg.com and we’ll be adding new details as we have them. In addition to live, private, and virtual options, we’ll be providing EVERYONE who participates in any of these options with a special bonus at no additional cost!

Now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast!

I closed the last message by asking you if you had ever stopped to consider whether or not you’ve been playing the right game… Kind of an odd question, huh… While I truly believe Bo Jackson would have been one of the best Major League Baseball players ever had he chosen just that instead pursuing his football career as well, that’s not where I was going with my question!

Another way of looking at that question could tie back to some of the decisions I had to make over the last several years. I had become very proficient in both safety and human resources, but I was never as fulfilled by either as I felt like I should be if I had to commit the bulk of my time to it. With that being the case, I decided to start down an extremely different path. You could say I chose a different game to participate in, but that’s still not what I was referring to what I left you with that question!

I was really challenging you to consider the differences between playing a finite game and playing an infinite game!

In comparing the two as he opens his book, Simon Sinek shares that an infinite game has “known players, fixed rules, and a clear end point” where an infinite game has “players that come and go, rules that change, and no defined end point.” Another huge difference is that a finite game has clear winners and losers where the only true way we can really lose in an infinite game is by dropping out of the process.

So much of what we’ve been trained to think pushes us to compete in finite games. Just like there are nine innings in a baseball game where the team with the most runs at the end wins and the other team loses, many publicly traded companies measure their success through their quarterly earnings reports or stockholder dividends as compared to their biggest competitor. And in some cases it can be considered an amazing quarter when you’ve out-performed the competitor but still missed your own target or even lost money.

As with most sports, gauging our success on our business making more money than another company often requires someone to lose in order for us to feel like we’ve won. But does it really have to be that way?

When I first heard Simon speak live as part of the 2016 Live2Lead event, he shared a story about how Microsoft had created a product that was so much better than the iPod and how the corporate executives were so very focused on taking market share away from their competitor’s product. Their goal was to win and for Apple to lose. 

When Simon was with some Apple executives soon afterward, he noticed that they had no intention whatsoever to compete with Microsoft for market share with that specific technology, they were completely focused on developing a new technology that would dwarf any success they had ever achieved with the iPod. They were instead competing against themselves! And that resulted in the iPhone, which essentially made all stand alone MP3 devices obsolete and now holds nearly 40% of the entire cell phone market share across North America…

While there’s no question about Apple’s performance, their focus was constantly on improving on their best results rather than beating anyone else. In the next message, I’m going to challenge you with some ways that you can do this regardless on The Name of the Game you’re currently playing...