Skip to content
Home » The Infinite Game: How to Lead in the 21st Century: Simon Sinek (Transcript)

The Infinite Game: How to Lead in the 21st Century: Simon Sinek (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Simon Sinek’s talk titled “The Infinite Game: How to Lead in the 21st Century.”

In this talk, author Simon Sinek discusses how to lead in the 21st century, and emphasizes the importance of trust, teams, and vision. He gives the example of Walt Disney as someone who was able to lead his company in a new direction by being brutally honest and admitting his lack of knowledge. He urges leaders to adopt an “infinite mindset” in order to build better relationships with their employees, friends, and family. In a finite game, where everyone is striving for results, it is important to maintain an open mind and focus on the people around you. Schools that adopt this mindset are typically more successful than those that do not.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

January 1968. The North Vietnamese armies launched a surprise attack against the American forces in the country. It was Tet, which is the Lunar New Year, and there was a tradition in Vietnam that lasted decades that there was never any fighting on Tet. But this year, 1968, the North Vietnamese generals decided that they would break this tradition with the hope that they would overwhelm American forces and bring about a swift end to the war. This was the Tet Offensive.

They threw 85,000 troops at over 125 targets across the country, catching the Americans completely by surprise. Many of the commanders weren’t even at their posts. They were in whatever local town or village celebrating Tet. Here’s the amazing thing. The United States military repelled every single attack, every single one.

Most of the major fighting had ceased after about a week, after which the United States had lost fewer than 1,000 troops, so a few hundred troops. North Vietnam had lost 35,000 of the 85,000 troops. That way went on for about a month. There, about 100 Marines were lost and 1,500 North Vietnamese were lost. Over the course of 10 years in Vietnam, America lost 58,000 men. North Vietnam lost over 3 million people. That’s an equivalent to 27 million Americans in 1968.

HOW DO YOU WIN MOST OF THE BATTLE?

And if you look at the Vietnam War, America won nearly every single major battle it fought. So it raises a very interesting question. How do you win most of the battle? How do you decimate your enemy and lose the war? Clearly, we don’t fully understand this concept of winning and losing. It’s not simply the score that we keep. There’s something more to it.

There’s a wonderful man by the name of James Carse. He’s a theologian. He used to teach at NYU, who wrote this wonderful little book called Finite and Infinite Games. And in it, he defines these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. If you have at least one competitor, you have a game. And there are two types of games, finite games and infinite games.

Finite games are defined as known players, fixed rules and an agreed upon objective. Football. We all agree to the rules of the game and we all agree that whoever has more goals at the end of the game is the winner and we all go home.

An infinite game is defined by known and unknown players. The rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game, to keep the game in play. When you pit a finite player versus a finite player, the system is stable. Football is stable. When you pit an infinite player versus an infinite player, the system is also stable. The Cold War was stable because we could not have a winner or a loser. We just both kept playing to make sure that the game stayed in play. That’s what kept it stable.

There’s no such thing as winning or losing an infinite game. What happens is when the player — one of the players runs out of the will or resources to continue to play, they drop out of the game. But the game continues with you or without you.

[continue_reading]

Problems arise, however, when you pit a finite player versus an infinite player. Because finite players are playing to win and infinite players are playing to keep playing and they’ll make very different strategic choices as a result. And this is what happened to America in Vietnam.

America was fighting to win and the North Vietnamese were fighting for their lives. And they would fight to the very last man if necessary. And when a finite player finds themselves against an infinite player, they will always find themselves in quagmire, racing through the will and resources to stay in the game.

So this gets me thinking. We are surrounded every day of our lives by infinite games. We are all unwitting players in these infinite games. There’s no such thing as being number one in marriage. There’s no such thing as winning in your friendships. There’s no such thing as winning global politics and there’s definitely no such thing as winning business.

But if we listen to the language of too many leaders, they don’t know the game they’re in. They talk about being number one, being the best, beating your competition, based on what agreed upon metrics, based on what agreed upon timeframes. Meaning the vast majority of our businesses, even of our political leaders, are playing by finite rules in an infinite game, which means we’re racing through the will and resources to stay in the game. In business we call it bankruptcy or merger and acquisition. Which means we need to completely readjust how we think about leadership to actually play for the game we’re in.

And the reason is important, because when we play with a finite mindset in the infinite game, there’s a few very predictable things that happen. There’s a decline of trust, there’s a decline of cooperation, and there’s a decline of innovation.

I had a real life experience that showed me what the difference between the two games was.