Infinite-Minded Metrics | Simon Sinek

So the infinite game is not the absence of finite games, it is the context within which those finite games exist. Right?

And it's also understanding the game you're in at the time you're in the game. So, for example, if it's a new business pitch that's finite, there is a beginning, middle and end. There is someone who'll be declared the winner, and there's a group that will be declared the losers. And then the game ends, right? The pitch is over. Now, once you have the relationship now, it should be more infinite minded, so you convert. It's like winning an election is finite, governance is infinite. And we see what happens in governance when they're trying to win, when there should be governing. Right? It hurts the whole system. So we overuse things like sports analogies in business, which is always a finite game. And I think a better analogy to use is lifestyle. And again, there's nothing wrong with metrics and goals. They're very important. Human beings need to count things. We're visually driven animals, we're tangibly driven animals. You can't run a marathon without mile markers. It's actually unnerving.

But we have to remember that those metrics are measures of speed and distance. How fast are we going? How far have we gone? But they're not that. They don't constitute the end of the game. They're just mile markers. And so a better way to think of business is like thinking, I want to be a healthy person that lives a healthy lifestyle. Okay, what are all the things you need to do? You need to eat well, you need to sleep, you need to nurse your personal relationships. You need to exercise. There's probably a list of 30 other things. What do you need to build a great business? You need marketing. You need sales. You need great hr. You need a great, oh my God, the list is exhaustive. You can't do all those things great all the time. Just like you can't do all those things great in our lives all the time. It's a pursuit. And the more we have help and the more we have a gym buddy, the more likely we are to be better at those things. And you can set arbitrary goals. And this is most of business, when somebody says, we're gonna hit this number on this date, somebody just made that up. Like, literally. In fact, sometimes goes, I think we can do better. And you're like, you're right. And here's the new goal. You, you know.

And it's usually 12 months because that's when we pay taxes. But that's arbitrary too. So if you're trying to lose X amount of weight by X date, arbitrary number, arbitrary date. Totally just like business. And what do you do? You start driving towards it and you measure every day, you stand on the scale every morning. And some days you feel good, some days you feel like you're falling behind. And let's say you hit that goal, you're elated, and then what? Well, the problem is the game's not over. You have to keep exercising for the rest of your life. Just because you hit a goal means nothing.

And can I also say how did.

You get to that and how did you get to the goal? And that I think is even more important, which is what happens if you miss the goal.

Well, you're probably way healthier now than you were when you started and you just picked the wrong number on the wrong date. You're easily going to hit your goal in 14 months. You can see the trend data. And I think that's the thing that's missing when we play the game of business, which is the absolutes are finite, but it's the trend, it's how we get somewhere. Because you know this as well as everybody in this room, which is if I have two teams and I simply bonus you by one factor and one factor alone, which is, did you hit the number on the date? Right. You know, you can have a leader who drops the price at the last minute, runs a bunch of promotions, begs, borrows, steals, stabs people in the back, steals information. They hit the number on the date, we treat them like a hero, we give them a bonus and it sends a message to the rest of the company. We don't care how you get your numbers as long as you get your numbers. Well, over the course of time that has an impact on your culture versus the team that has an amazing. Nobody quits, nobody's fired, morale is high. And you see the trend data is beautiful. It's not this roller coaster, it's just beautiful line. And they just miss the number on the date and we give that team nothing. As opposed to saying you're going to hit your goal. You guys have been doing well and we do bonus that team. And I think it's very important to consider how we got there. Are you obeying our values as you work and what's the trend hit on that?

Obeying the values, Getting into culture. You said earlier the decline of trust.

Yeah.

With the infinite game versus the finite game. Hit that. Because I think that's a beautiful message.

So when we driven again, if you're in a finite game, play by finite rules, but the context has to be infinite. And this is where vision and mission comes in. I call it the just cause, which is all of those finite wins are for. What are they? To make a small group of people much wealthier.

What's the goal of hitting those? So you can drag your number one based on the metrics that you chose. You know, market share, revenues. I mean, who knows? Number of offices you get to pick.

Have you ever noticed that every airline is number one? Never noticed that.

And to understand that these goals that we're trying to hit, they serve a higher purpose, I had the opportunity to visit Quantico Marine Base.

In Virginia. And this is where they select their officers.

And one of the things they run them through is something called the LRC, which is the Leadership Reaction Course, which is 20 mini obstacle courses. They're basically problem solving courses. Like, you have to get all your men and materiel over this little water hazard. It's what the Marines call a pond.

You know, within the certain time frame, with three planks of wood of different size, stuff like that. Right. And when I was watching them do it, I'm standing next to the drill instructor, and he, you know, they're grading the Marines to see their leadership qualities, and nowhere on the page does it say, that made it. They made it to the other side. Mission success was not on the sheet. And I said, how come you don't have, like, if they made it to the side on the. On the page, like, it's not even a checkbox. And the drill instructor said, we understand that good leaders sometimes suffer mission failure, and bad leaders sometimes enjoy mission success. He said, what we're looking for are the qualities that make someone a good leader. And if we select people that exhibit the qualities of good leadership, we know over the course of time, they will enjoy more success than not.

Maybe I'm going the wrong direction here, but we're such a metric focused group. What kind of metrics can you use? The infinite game.

So the traditional metrics are fine. There's nothing wrong with the traditional metrics.

But there are other metrics that are missing. Like I said, I like trend data in the infinite game rather than absolutes. I like to know, like, okay, we missed our numbers this month. That's okay. How have they been? Like, is it an anomaly? Is it a blip? Like, should we panic? I mean, there was a great story just a few years ago.

From IBM where they missed their sales numbers, and the CEO, Jim McCaffrey, came out and made a video and then sent this video out to the whole company, which is humiliating for the sales team. And by the way, it was the first time they'd missed their numbers in something like 68 quarters. The first time ever. And her reaction was to dump on a group of people and destroy morale. It could have been a blip. Maybe it was something in the marketplace. Maybe it had nothing to do with IBM. Maybe it was something because their processes needed fixing. So, I mean, that's my point, which is we're so obsessed with those numbers that we literally fail to recognize that this has been our Trend data for 68 quarters. Blip.

It's myopic. It's close judgment.

So I think the traditional metrics are okay. If we take a broad view, my hope is that we develop new metrics to live alongside. The analogy I'll give is, you know, most of us, the person we end up with for the rest of our lives, you know, we find them physically attractive, great, but that's not enough. We want to know the depth of the kind of person they are. And metrics are the same in business, which is, you know, the traditional metrics are the easy things to measure. Like, physical attractiveness is the easy thing to see. And I think that we need new metrics in business, not to replace, but to just offer some balance. So do we have good metrics of.

The health of our culture? Do we have good metrics of the health of our leaders? Do we have good metrics of the health of our people.

That goes beyond the annual pulse survey?