Latest Book Review: The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek

I had the pleasure of seeing Simon Sinek speak in person recently where he weaved together stories and anecdotes from each of his books, Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game.

More humble than I was expecting, his arrival on stage to pyrotechnics left him more embarrassed than a rock star appearing on stage to wow the audience. He sat quietly on a stool and engaged in simple and straight forward conversation about his books and how they still hold true all these years down the line from having first written them.

I first came across The Infinite Game in 2019 when working with a client that was beginning the process of reinventing itself. The message? Create something that will out live you. And that's pretty much the entire message this book embodies and which Sinek spoke to in the two hours be held people's attention while speaking on stage to a 7,000+ strong audience.

The Infinite Game talks about the two types of mindset leaders can fall into when growing their business. The finite-minded business leader - who "uses the company’s performance to demonstrate the value of their own career" versus the infinite-minded leaders - who "wants to build a company that embraces surprises and adapts with them"; an organisation that can last the test of time and out live any leader's leadership tenure in doing so.

Sinek links the Infinite Game back to his first book, Start With Why, saying that playing the Infinite Game requires leaders and organisations to have "a crystal clear 'Just Cause'"; a Just Cause being a specific vision of a future that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.

Infinite-minded leaders don’t ask people to fixate on finite goals. Instead, they ask their people to help them figure out a way to advance toward a more infinite vision of the future that everyone can benefit from. Finite goals become markers of progress being made toward that vision and aren't the be-all and end-all of what a company is trying to achieve.

For Sinek this is all about mindset. Is a leader in something for the long game or are they only interested in the here and now. He writes this as he knows that commerce and capitalism has fallen into the sway of short-term, finite-minded thinking. His view, we have an opportunity to advance a different reality and it starts with the adoption of a totally different mindset.

There is no such thing as "winning or losing" in an infinite game, players simply drop out of the game when they run out of the will and resources to keep playing. To succeed in the Infinite Game, leaders need to stop thinking about who "wins" or who’s "the best" and start thinking about how to build organisations that are "strong enough and healthy enough to stay in the game for many generations to come."