The Infinite Game: How to Lead in the 21st Century

Hello, January 1968, the North Vietnamese army launched a surprise attack on American forces in the country, it was Tet, which is the Lunar New Year, and there was a tradition in Vietnam that lasted for decades that there was never any fighting on Tet except this one. anus. In 1968, North Vietnamese generals decided to break with tradition in hopes of overwhelming American forces and bringing about a quick end to the war. This was the Tet Offensive. They launched 85,000 troops against more than 125 targets across the country and captured the Americans. Completely by surprise, many of the commanders were not even at their posts, they were in any local town or village celebrating Tet.

Here's the amazing thing: the US military repelled every attack, every single one of them, most of the major fighting had ceased after about a week. after which the United States had lost less than a thousand soldiers, so a few hundred soldiers North Vietnam had lost thirty-five thousand of the eighty-five thousand soldiers "we were for about a month there, about a hundred Marines were lost and 1,500 North Vietnamese soldiers were lost over the course of ten years in Vietnam. The United States lost 58,000 men. North Vietnam lost more than three million people, which is equivalent to 27 million Americans in 1968, and if you look at it.

In the Vietnam War, the United States won almost every major battle it fought. It raises a very interesting question: how do you win most battles and how do you decimate the enemy and lose the war? concept of winning and losing. It's not just the score that we keep. There's something else. There's something else. A wonderful man named James Carr C is a theologian who used to teach at New York University and he wrote this wonderful little book called. finite and

infinite

game

s and in it defines these two types of

game

s, finite games and

infinite

games if you have at least one. competitor you have a game and there are two types of games find a game and infinite games finite games are defined as known players fixed rules and an agreed goal football we all agree with the rules of the game and we all agree that whoever has plus the goals at the end of the game are the winner we all go home an infinite game is defined by known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the goal is to perpetuate the game to keep it in play when pitting finite player against finite player the system is stable football is stable when you pit an infinite player against an infinite player the system is also stable the cold war was stable because we couldn't have a winner or a loser we both kept playing to make sure the game stayed the same game that is what fits it kept it stable there is no such thing as winning or losing an infinite game what happens is that when the player or one of the players runs out of will or resources to continue playing they abandon the game but the game continues With or without you, problems arise, however, when you pit a finite player against an infinite player because finite players play to win and infinite players play to keep playing and as a result they will make very different strategic decisions and this is what?

What happened to the United States in Vietnam? The United States was fighting to win and the North Vietnamese were fighting for their lives and would fight to the last man if necessary and when a finite player meets an infinite player they will always find themselves in quagmire races. through the will and resources to stay in the game, so this makes me think that we are surrounded every day of our lives by infinite games. We are all unwilling players in these infinite games. There is no such thing as being number one in marriage. There is no such thing. winning in your friendships there is no such thing as winning global politics and there is definitely no such thing as winning business, but if we listen to the language of too many

lead

ers, they don't know what game they are in, they talk about being number one. the best beating their competition based on what they agreed upon metrics based on agreed deadlines, which means the vast majority of our businesses are up and running, even our political

lead

ers are playing by finite rules in an infinite game, which means We are racing through the will and resources to stay in the game and the business we call bankruptcy or merger and acquisition, which means we need to completely readjust our way of thinking about leadership to really play in the game we we are and the reason is important because when you play with a finite mindset in the infinite game, some very predictable things happen, there is a decrease in trust, there is a decrease in cooperation and there is a decrease in innovation.

I had a real life experience that showed me what the difference was between the two games. I spoke at an education summit for Microsoft. I also spoke at an education summit for Apple. At the Microsoft summit. I'd say 70 to 80 percent of executives spent 70 to 80 percent of their presentations talking about how to beat Apple on the Apple Watch. At the Summit, 100 percent of executives spent 100 percent of their presentations talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn. One was obsessed with where they were going and the other was obsessed with beating the competition.

Guess which one was in the quagmire. guess which one I was waiting running between the will and the resources to stay in the game at the end of my talk at Microsoft they gave me a gift they gave me the new Zune when it existed this was Microsoft's answer to the iPod this little piece The technology was absolutely fantastic , the user interface was simple, easy to understand, it was elegant, it worked perfectly, it was a brilliant little piece of technology. I'm sharing a taxi with a senior Apple executive after the Apple talk and I couldn't. I helped myself I just had to stir the pot so I turned him around and said you know, Microsoft gave me their new Zune, it's way better than your iPod touch and he looks at me and says I have no doubts and the conversation is over. because an infinite gamer understands that sometimes you have the best product and other times they have the best product and there is no such thing as winning or being the best, there is only back and forth and the only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself. , the goal is to make a better product this year than last year to ensure that your culture is stronger this year than last year that your leaders are growing at a stronger rate this year than last year that everything related to your organization, its systems, everything is to improve improve and improve is a constant improvement this game has no end it is a game of constant improvement which means that if we have to completely reconfigure our way of thinking about leadership for the infinite game, the question arises : how are we supposed to lead?

In the infinite game, there are five things that must happen to truly become an infinite game leader. One, you must have a just cause, two, you must have confident teams, three, you must have a worthy adversary, you must have existential flexibility. and five, you must have the courage to lead just because there is a purpose or a cause that is so righteous that you would willingly sacrifice yourself to be a part of it, it doesn't have to be a sacrifice of your life, but you would turn down a better paying job because you would rather stay. here and being a part of what you're doing now means that you voluntarily work late or go on business trips or maybe you don't see your family so much that you don't like it, but it's worth it, it feels worth it, that is what a Just Cause is, there are many excellent just causes out there.

Apple was founded on the premise that people should be able to take on Big Brother, which is why they are so attractive to creatives and young people. who like the idea of ​​taking on Big Brother, the United States wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal endowed with these unalienable rights which include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that is an ideal, just causes, or a description of future states so ideal that for all practical purposes we will never achieve that vision, but we will die trying. That is the point. This is what gives meaning to our lives and our work.

It's not just about achieving some kind of metric and hitting some kind of goal. That serves no purpose, but rather each goal we achieve is a marker that we are progressing towards something even greater. It's about momentum, not absolute values. Yes, metrics are very, very important, they help us count speed and distance, and every milestone we pass helps us. I feel like we're getting closer and closer, which energizes us, we can do this, we can do this, you have to adjust because sometimes we use the word vision. I don't like the word vision because there is no standard definition of it.

Speak. I tell companies all the time what their company's vision is to be the largest in our industry by 2024 what their vision is they give me a dollar sign an amount they want to achieve has nothing to do with the vision the reason Why we call it the vision is because you have to be able to see it. Imagine a different world than the one we have now. You believe that if everything you did in your organization turned out perfect, you would contribute to the construction of that world. I have a vision. I imagine a world in which that the vast majority of people wake up inspired every morning, feel confident at work, and return home satisfied at the end of the day.

I have completely dedicated everything I do to help advance this worldview that I know I earned. I'll never get there, but I'll die trying. That is the point. Every organization that says we choose, trust every organization that says we choose people over profits. Every organization that says there has to be a better way to do this every time. organization that wants technology boobs people means that we are moving towards this world that I imagine again what gives our lives and our work, which means that we will voluntarily dedicate our lives to these just causes, too many people look for a cause, you know, depending what job are they in this is I have friends, you know they have a job and I ask them: do you feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself?, they absolutely leave, then they quit or they get fired and then they say no, um, this new job, this is what I wanted to do and they quit or they got fired and they got a new job like this, this is the one you have in every job, no matter where you quit or get fired, it doesn't matter In every job you have to contribute to the same vision and what is so interesting about vision is that we don't have to put pressure on ourselves to be visionary;

There are a very small handful of people in our population who are visionaries. You are Steve. Jobs, you are the true visionaries of Richard Branson, we don't have to have a vision, we have to find a vision, if there was someone else's vision, that gives us goosebumps, if there is someone else's vision, we say that That's the world I want to live in. And I have a dream, said Martin Luther King, that one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with other white children. If you want to live in that world, choose theirs and dedicate your life and career to helping build that vision somewhere. way shape or form even if it's just small steps that's what makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves finding the divide is the important part it's very important when we talk to organizations to ask them what they believe what the vision is what it is Just Cause number two trusting the teams I went on a business trip to Las Vegas and was put up at the Four Seasons, a beautiful hotel, the reason it is a beautiful hotel is not because of the beds which any hotel can buy a fancy bed, it's because of the people who work there that when you walk down the halls and someone says hello you get the distinct feeling that they wanted to say hello they told them to say hello we can tell the difference we are highly attuned social animals we can tell the difference with this guy From behavior you can always tell when someone is working at the Commission, you can tell they are having a coffee in a coffee shop in the lobby, so one afternoon I went to buy myself a cup of coffee and the barista who worked in the day is a boy named Noah Noah was funny, charming and attractive and I stood there for too long teasing Noah just to buy a cup of coffee so as is my nature I asked Noah if you like your job without missing a beat .

I said I love my job now to someone in my line of work, that's important because liking it is rational. I like the people I work with. I like the challenge. I get well paid. I like my job. Love is emotional. It is a higher order thing. you love your wife, I like her a lot, it's different Noah said I love my job, so I immediately followed up tell me specifically, I asked you what the four seasons are doing and would you tell me that you love yourwork without missing a beat. Noah said that. Throughout the day, managers walk by me and ask me how I'm doing, ask me if there's anything I need to do my job better, not just my manager, any manager, and then tell me I also work at Caesar's Palace and Managers walk past us and catch us if we are doing something wrong.

They want to make sure we're doing everything right. They want to do the numbers. I like to keep my head under the radar and just get through the day and get paid. my paycheck said only in the four seasons do I feel like I can be myself that's a team of trust that's what a circle of safety is when we come to work and feel like we can be ourselves we feel like we can make mistakes we feel Like our bosses are there to see us succeed. I get this question all the time. Simon, how can I get the most out of my people?

As if they were a towel that you wring out. It's flawed. The question is how can I help create an environment where my people can work at their natural best? Then the answers will be completely different. That's called good leadership, and the leader's responsibility is to create an environment in which people can work at their natural best. where people can trust each other develop these trusting teams trusting teams is a very specific thing trusting teams means that someone can come to work and raise their hand and say, I made a mistake. I don't feel like I have the proper training to do the job you've asked me to do I'm afraid I have problems at home and it's affecting my work I need help without fear of humiliation or retaliation In any case they say these things with absolute confidence that people will rush to help them, if we don't have trusted teams, what we do have is a group of people who show up to work every day lying, hiding, pretending that they would never admit mistakes for fear that they would have been put on a short list of layoffs the next time they come. rise or get into trouble, they will never tell you that you have promoted them and that they don't know how to do their job for fear of not having earned it or not being good enough, whether they are going to lose your trust, they are never going to admit that they are having problems at home and that it is affecting their work for fear that if they took a day off it would affect them and you are certainly never going to say that they need Help me guess what happens to an organization where most people do not admit mistakes and they don't say they need help.

Eventually things start to fail and start to get worse. We saw it happen. Remember the news from a couple of years ago. United Airlines dragged a paying passenger off its plane with a broken nose, a concussion and two broken teeth. I feel sorry for every member of that crew because 100% of them knew that was the wrong thing to do and they didn't intervene because they were afraid to go in. More trouble than they feared doing the right thing stood back and watched this was not an anomaly this did not happen overnight this was not a one time occurrence I flew United Airlines the years before and in some I saw something happen in front of me That was a red flag.

I was waiting to board the plane and an Essene played in front of me where one of the passengers tried to board the plane before his group number was called high crimes and misdemeanors and the gate agent yelled at him to come in. Besides sir, I have not called her group yet, please step aside and wait until I call her group, since she spoke to a paying customer. I spoke and told him: why do you have to talk to us that way? Why can't she talk to us? us as if we were human beings and she looked me in the eyes and said sir, if I don't follow the rules I could get in trouble or lose my job, which she revealed to me is that she doesn't feel safe in our own organization. her leaders don't trust her to do the job she has been trained to do and guess who suffers, customer and company, the reason we fly like Virgin or Southwest Airlines or any of these other airlines is not because they have some magic formula to hire. the best people is because the people who work there feel safe, they feel they have agency, they feel they can make decisions in their own jobs, and they feel that their leaders trust them to do the job they have been trained to do. and guess who benefits the client and the company, that is creating a circle of security, that is a team of trust, that people feel that they also have control and agency over their own jobs.

I spoke at a large energy company. I did a workshop with some. senior executives at a large energy company in the United States and it was an incredibly hot room they had us in, so I said, I asked something seemingly very obvious, but do you think we could turn on the air conditioning? and we came back after lunch, it was the afternoon of many hours since my request and it was still incredibly hot and I said if we could turn on the air conditioning, they said yes, we told the facilities people here that they had to send the request to the headquarters in Houston.

We're waiting for Houston to come back. to us before they can turn off the air conditioning, that's the air conditioning, imagine how the rest of that organization works, that everyone there is afraid to make a decision, no one has agency or control and there is one thing we know about beings humans than our sense of enjoyment at work does not come from work-life balance and the amount of yoga we practice, our sense of enjoyment at work and the sense of stress we have has to do with our sense of control than when we feel we have control over our We actually enjoy work more and control is taken away from us;

We are afraid to make any kind of decision. In reality, that is what dramatically increases stress among human beings. If you want to play in the infinite game, you must be confident. teams, people are willing to help each other when things go wrong, people are willing to admit mistakes, but if we can't keep the organization improving, it will take down worthy rival number three, there is another guy who does what I do, writes books, does the same. Talking and is exceptionally good at what he does. He is incredibly respected. Personally, I greatly admire his work and I hate it.

I'm not being funny. In fact, I hate it. He has never done anything wrong with me. He has always been very polite and charming. I see it, it's irrational, I hate it, what do you want to tell yourself? I regularly go online and check the ratings of my books and then immediately check yours. I don't check anyone else's, only yours, and if I'm a leader, I'm conceited and if it's a boss I get angry and when people mention your name I like it, yeah, it's cool, so they invited us to speak at the same event once, I don't mean him in the morning, me in the afternoon. late, I mean, on stage we were going to be interviewed together and the interviewer thought it would be funny if we introduced ourselves, so I went first, turned to him on stage and said, "you make me incredibly insecure." I told him all your strengths are all my weaknesses and whatever your name makes me uncomfortable he looked at me he said funny I think the same about you the reason I hated him had nothing to do with him it's because he reminded me that he revealed his La My very existence revealed my weaknesses to me and it was much easier to take that energy and turn it against someone than to admit to myself that I have some work to do.

It was a surprisingly cathartic experience that day. Since then I never checked his ratings and I actually love him now and I've stayed at his house and we talk all the time. He has become a dear friend. I'm not going to tell you that there is a whole moral to the story he has. It has nothing to do with who it is, it's fiction, maybe it's all fiction, in reality it's not, so I said that the only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself, but what you have to have as a worthy rival is someone who is better than you. you in your own industry. maybe or in another industry who is better at something that you do and instead of hating them and trying to beat them and trying to surpass them, we learn from them, we admire them, we respect them because, by revealing our weaknesses to us, it gives us tools to go back and then see where we need to improve and we wish them the best of luck it's not about them it's about us because the goal is not to beat them the goal is to simply improve and stay in the game as long as possible and if they folded early than us, so the game will continue with or without them, a worthy rival.

Apple in the early days had IBM, the big blue, IBM represented the Navy and Apple was the Pirates and then IBM left the game and then it was Microsoft hello. I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, they represented the Navy and the Apple representative who represented the Pirates and then they left the game and now it's Google and Facebook that Apple is going up against in terms of privacy and other things like a rival worthy to reveal our weaknesses to us so that we can come back and show that if we are obsessed with beating our competition it is like running in a race and tripping near the competitor you will win the race but you are still a slow runner and the problem is that there will be another race and another race and another race and another race and it never ends sure you win a couple but you are still a slow runner the point is to improve yourself you have a worthy rival you know who they can be companies, they can even be individuals at work.

I am completely against the idea of ​​creating internal competition. I hear this from companies all the time. We like to drive performance by pitting our people against each other. Well, that means they're going to hurt each other. I want my people to share information, not hoard it. I want my people to help other divisions, not complain about them, but rivalry is good, you absolutely can have rivals in your own company, people who are better at your job than you, people who are better leaders than you when you look at them. They say I want to be like that girl I'm not like that boy they are so good they make me insecure they are so good those are the people to admire having rivals absolutely again is another tool to constantly improve, which is what we need in the infinite game number four, it's the capacity for existential flexibility, so there's something really funny when you think about what is existential, if you compare finite games and infinite games in a finite game, it's the game. that ends then the soccer game ends but the players continue to exist until there is another game they just wait to play another game true the game ends in the infinite game it is the players who disappear the game is constant but the players cease to exist the companies They break up the Roman Empire no longer exists the players disappear so this concept of existential flexibility is literally existential can you stay in the game because you are the one who is going to disappear? the ability for existential flexibility is simply a dramatic change in strategy because you find a better way to advance your cause, so in the early days of Apple, Apple had already emerged, it emerged from the success of Apple one into Apple two, they were late '70s and early '80s and their next big computer was whatever they were developing. and coincidentally Jobs and some of his senior executives went to visit Xerox PARC, which was the Xerox Innovation Center, and Xerox showed them a new technology they had invented called graphical user interface where it was not necessary to learn how to use computers. language to use a computer, which is how it used to be, but now you can use this thing called a mouse and you can move a cursor on a desktop and click on folders and move them and things to use the computer and work, so this technology and thought that this was surprising if you're trying to train people to take on Big Brother, this means that that way more people would have access to the technology than people who learn a computer language and when they left Xerox PARC told them your guys: we have to invest in this graphical user interface and one of the executives, the voice of reason said Steve, we can't, we have already invested millions of dollars and countless hours of work in a completely distant and different strategic direction, if the we give up, we will. blow up his own company to which Jobs actually said we'd better blow ourselves up than someone else that decision turned the Macintosh into such a deep technology that all Windows software is designed to look like a Macintosh the reason why We all have computers at home and at work it is due to that decision.

To the outside world, it seems like you are crazy to do that and would risk losing money or possible failure. Why would you abandon something that works for something that may not work, but for the person making the decision because they are driven by a just cause, it is very easy for them to see that staying on the path they are on is the path they are on. will lead to their death, that this decision is the obvious choice and that money means nothing because it means survival and the ability to continue to thrive. Existential flexibility.

For this reason, George Eastman was also a visionary. He was a young man who worked in a bankin Rochester, New York, and decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He was 22 years old. 12. 21 years old. that and then everyone was doing land prospecting in those days with the dotcoms and so he wanted to become a land digger and he was too, he was going on a land prospecting trip and a colleague of his from the banks . that you should carry a camera to take photographs of the land you wish to prospect for reference. The problem was that in those days the main way to take photographs was that you had to hire photographers.

You couldn't take pictures of your own vacation. You can take pictures of your own family, only professional photographers can do that, so Eastman ended up not going on the trip, but he actually kept up the hobby of photography and the problems are so complicated that he would have taken all these chemicals in this camera. the size of a microwave oven and tents to load the film and the guy said, well I'll be a little simpler, this is ridiculous, I just want to take pictures for fun, it's none of my business, so he finds a way to cover dishes.

The film plate, so we didn't have to do it, would deal with all the toxic chemicals that are in the field. It turns out that other photographers wanted his plates and started buying them, so he tried the technology and invented something called film, where now he could take a hundred pictures with a piece of flexible film built into the camera. He flies to England to present his technology at what is the equivalent of a technology exhibition. It was a big photography show here, where people come from miles around to see the latest and greatest, the latest and greatest, like what's the big thing in Las Vegas.

Oh, he just sees, yeah, thank you, it was like CES and it was a huge success. Everyone thought this movie was absolutely amazing. incredible and no one would buy one it was a complete commercial disaster because the quality of the photographs was not good enough, they were too grainy and for professionals they needed high quality films now for any of us, for any of us who are entrepreneurs who came up with technology, the obvious choice would be to go back, improve the technology, demand is like begging for your product, we just have to fix the technology and we're ready, that's not what George Eastman did because he was obsessed with democratizing photography. and even if he understood how many professional photographers there are, he wanted to make it easier for the rest of us just like he made it easier for himself, so he did an existential flex, abandoned the professional market completely and said, you know there's a whole market who does not care about the quality of photography the general population and they marketed the camera and flexible film to the general population it is thanks to George Eastman that we take our own photographs of our own families and our own vacations George Eastman built Kodak, a word he invented because he thought K was a strong-sounding letter and he became one of the richest men in the world along with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers years later, a company. who remained obsessed with the democratization of technology that had continued to make it easier and easier for us to take photographs in 1975 Kodak invented the digital camera and when the young man who invented it showed it to the executives they first complained about the image quality, then they said that no one wanted to see pictures on a screen and then they decided to suppress the technology for fear that it would cannibalize film sales and they built an entire company based on which they made the paper, they made the chemicals that made the machines that made the film based on this and they couldn't imagine having to reconfigure their company for something different they gave themselves ten years they knew someone else would discover digital and they gave themselves ten years or more Over the course of those ten years, you know, they did nothing and yeah, new technologies began to emerge and the code action at Kodak actually generated billions of dollars from licensing their patents for the digital camera and then when those patents ran out three years later, they went bankrupt because they didn't have the ability to existential flexibility if you are not willing to blow up your company, the market will blow it up for you that is exactly what happened there was a limited runway they had the cause they chose to abandon the cause to do something finite to do something that protects the certainty of the future versus doing something that they know is the right thing to do in the long term, that is the capacity for existential flexibility that brings to the end the courage to lead.

I always joke that it's a little embarrassing to have to have courage on the list, but the reason it's there is because everything I've told you today is incredibly difficult, all the pressures in our lives, whether from the markets or of our families or the incentive structures in our companies are trying to force us to consider the finite, they are trying to force us to consider the short term and the long term, consider profits before people and, by the way, when I talk about put people before profits, not "It doesn't mean like 1% profits, 99% of people like it, it can be like 5149, it means there is a bias, it means that when there is a decision, we know that one of them is going to being sacrificed, we lean towards people, it does not mean that we." Against profits, remember to stay in the game, you need resources and the will to stay in the game, profitability is important, but you have a bias towards people, that is difficult, it is difficult, it is much easier to have layoffs in instead of finding a way to protect them.

If you look at all the companies, we admire all of them who I would consider infinite leaders, either they've never done the dances or they only use them very sparingly in extreme times and they're very, very embarrassed that they've done them and so on. It was a complete shock to their system which they are still recovering from and they admitted it takes courage. Do you know how much courage it takes to do an existential flex with a cause in mind? Why are you making this change? Because I have a vision of a future that is completely unrealizable and that is why I am going to change the direction of my company.

Walt Disney did it. The guy who basically invented animation as we have it today. He was the first to add sound to an animation. He was the first to do it. a Snow White animated feature film where you could be physically transported, but the problem was that once you finished the movie it was over, he wanted to physically keep the people in the movie in the fantasy and after all that success, no one would . They let him make the parks and then he sold all of his interest in Walt Disney Animation and quit to start a completely new company and had to self-finance it because he says he couldn't put his dreams up as collateral with the bank.

He's not interested in his dream as collateral and that became Disneyland, which to this day I believe makes more money than any other division of Disney and continues to grow and grow and grow, it's endless. Disney Land strives to improve, that was really his vision. was that it takes courage to risk everything, it takes courage to say I don't know what I'm doing and the leader has to lead by example, that's scary because we think we have to have all the answers we have to have. It is difficult all the time for MIT to admit its ability to fail.

It's hard to admit that there are other people who are better than us. We've all been in new business launches and someone says what's up with their competition and we come up with some nonsense about how. In reality we are better than them when deep down and we saw it inside we know that there is much better than us. I used it. I remember this in the early days when I had a marketing consultancy before all that why and all this career that I'm in this now and I remember I used to do new business presentations and I remember being so brutally honest, you know, I would say that I'm very good at this, I'm good at this, you shouldn't hire me for this and they wanted me to hire me for everything just because I was honest, because every other launch they had the day before it was created, that other company was brilliant at everything, even though they knew I was terrible at these things, they just knew that I be honest when things break there's something to be said for honesty we trust your people it's anthropological it's biological there's no escape it goes back too early early humanity when someone says there is danger it actually has to be there when someone says there is no danger danger you are fine we have to believe them that is why we take recommendations from close friends and not from strangers, like if a stranger approaches you on the street and tells you that you should see this movie, but if your friend tells you that you should see this movie, like run out and buy a ticket you don't even read the reviews you trust that there is something to be said about honesty it's hard to be honest It's very difficult all the time, do I look fat in these jeans?

I like the other genes better, no one said honesty has it Being mean The courage to lead fundamentally means that you are willing to have an open mind to consider that maybe the way you think the world works may be wrong and the way in that we have been building our business based on all social conventions. and what everyone tells us is the right thing to do may be wrong and just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's right, remember that the vast majority of business philosophies and practices we practice today are not business norms. , they are recent.

Coming from the 70s and 80s, Sharyl's concept of supremacy where we prioritize the interest of an outside shareholder over the interests of our employers or clients was a theory proposed in the late 70s and popularized in the 80s and 90s by bastards like Jack Welch, who ran GE. The concept of using mass layoffs to meet an arbitrary year-end financial projection did not exist before the 1980s; It was popularized by bastards like Jack Welch and General Electric. Ranking and dumping the idea of ​​ranking employees based on performance to promote the top 10% and fire the bottom 10% didn't exist before Mr.

Welch and this man named Milton Friedman, an economist who earned this guy the Nobel Prize, they gave the Nobel Prize to Milton Freeman. He is credited with basically giving us what is considered the accepted definition of corporate responsibility. He said the responsibility of businesses is to maximize profits. Within the limits of the law, what happened to ethics? Because ethics is a much higher standard than the law. The creators of the Titanic in the early 20th

century

built a ship that was four times larger than any other ship of the time and the regulations governing it. Lifeboats were based on the size of the ship and they did not yet have lifeboats for all supplies.

He was saying that if your ship is this size, you need so many lifeboats if your ship as a side needs so many lifeboats and his ship was four. times larger than the largest, so they knew that eventually the regulation would catch up, that eventually you would have lifeboats for all the provisions of the law, but until man did it, literally, to save money, that was their reason to save money, they left empty berths on the Titanic where the lifeboats will go when the law catches up, but until then we just won't put anything in, so they only had 25 percent of the lifeboats required for the number of passengers on board the Titanic.

We all know what happened in 1912. You hit an iceberg, you want to guess how many people died, you're right, 75 percent didn't break any laws, think about how many CEOs are dragged before the court of public opinion after having done something disgustingly unethical and what does everyone do? Let's say we were under the law then, we did not break any laws, this is the standard for business, so the people who are now anti-capitalists what they have not understood at all is that the capitalism we have is not actually capitalism as Adam Smith imagined it. we have bastard capitalism, capitalism for bastards, if you will, and the capitalism that we practice today is not actually the purest form of capitalism, it actually undermines it, where we have increasing levels of stress, we have decreasing levels of technology, decreasing levels of of trust, decreasing levels of cooperation we have unstable economies it is due to this false view of capitalism that we have as imagined by Adam Smith it was about trust it was about cooperation it was about human beings he believed that people were prioritized over profits in he actually wrote in The Wealth of Nations that I don't need to talk more about it, it's obvious and then I didn't write anything else about it that's why we have to challenge the system that's why we need an infinite mindset that's why we have to have the courage to stand up to Milton Friedman and tell him that you are wrong, I don't care about your prize, well, he is the one who must be right, is to facebastards like Jack Welch and the people who have immortalized him and say no, our form of capitalism puts people first. trust cooperation empathy maternal instinct longevity is not not the same as long term or sustainable I don't use the word long term 20 years long term 30 years long term infinite which raises a very interesting question: what does it mean to live in infinite life clearly our lives They are finite but life is infinite we are the players in them an infinite game we are born we die we come we go the game continues with us or without us the game does not care and like the game of In business like the game of education, like the game of global politics, we can't choose the game, but we can choose how to play, that's the only choice we have and if we choose to live our lives with the finite mindset that we have. playing to win we play so that someone else loses we play to advance our careers faster than others to earn more money than others we compare scores constantly we slice and dice to prove ourselves the best thing is that we are number one, we can make up the numbers on deadlines, but it is very important for us that everyone thinks we are number one, trust is not built that way, cooperation is difficult to achieve through innovation, forget it.

I will be rich and then when you die you won't be able to take anything with you and we won't miss you, we will forget your name and your business will probably close right after you or else it will go like this slowly, if it is big it can afford to stay in business for a while, but that doesn't mean it's permanent or that we can choose to live our lives with an infinite mindset, it means we give our companies a cause worth rallying around. We work because we give our families a cause worth helping each other because we are committed to being the leaders we wish we had We are committed to building circles of safety in which people feel safe and we trust each other and are willing to take risks to be vulnerable to set the tone because if we take care of each other this can last longer than me we are willing to have rivals and be honest about our weaknesses and admit that there are other people who are much better at what we do than us and we must learn from them that we are willing to make that massive change if we find a better way to advance our cause and we will have the courage to tell all the people who say we are crazy idealists yes, yes, we are, yes.

I'll take the risk. I'll take my chances because fundamentally that's what the infinite mindset is. It's code for idealists to operate in a world that tells us it should be truly realistic. It's code for people who believe that an unrealizable vision worth dedicating our lives to is better than a short-term goal. The choice. to live an infinite life means that we leave a legacy means that when we pass others will take up the torch and carry on without us I had the opportunity to sit next to Richard Branson at a dinner once and I asked him when you die, how should we judge you, how should we judge your success, I asked him, I said, what did you do? in virgin that we will look back and say you were successful and he said don't judge me by anything I did in virgin if you want to judge my life you judge me by the quality of my children that is an infinite mentality that is someone who has lived their lives with the expectation that other people would carry a torch and all the foundations he laid were not for profit, they were not for fame, they were to keep the torch burning, the choice is ours, thank you, so let's ask questions, can we bring the house lights? up please, house lights, house lights all the way up, in the back, yes, it's very nice to see you, so we have microphones there, ms2 up there too.

I can't see them but I know they are there and there so go to the microphones and then other people can hear your questions and if you have a babysitter you can go. I won't be. I won't be offended. Hi Simon, I'm Lauren. Pleased to meet you. Hello, one of my favorite stories you tell is the only one. about Bob Chapman mm-hm and how Bob believes in heart counting mm-hmm instead of people counting and how he introduced the furlough program and when I first heard that I was very touched because I had never worked in any company and I've worked at many and I can't think of a single company that would have used that mm-hm.

So it's very rare that people have the courage to leave, but it's really based on who they are as a human and their desire or it can be something that becomes something that builds momentum and people see that it's the right thing to do because otherwise Otherwise, how do you connect to see the change? I ask the corporate world what you mean by a gentleman named Bob Chapman, who I wrote about at length in the book, leaders eat last and, as you said, at Bob's company they don't have a head count, they have a heart count.

In difficult times, it is very difficult to reduce the heart count, it is one way of seeing. human beings and they see that they have the belief that every person in their company is someone's son and someone's daughter and they take that into account every time they make a decision that I am responsible for someone's son and someone's daughter and yes, it is who Bobby is, I mean, he is, he is who he is, he uses humanity and idealism, he is a kind of remarkable human being and the question was: do we want more of Bob Chapman, so my friend George Flinn, who was a retired Marine general, said the first criterion.

To be a leader you have to want to be right, so if you join the United States Marine Corps you cannot leave it, you cannot change your mind at any time and say: "I would like to leave, please, whenever you want." . you're in boot camp and you hate your life you signed a contract they won't let you out of anything if you want to be an officer in the United States Marine Corps out of the ten weeks of training you can drop out the first six weeks they may just leave no questions , they will let you out of the contract because their attitude is that we don't want leaders who don't want to be leaders and therefore the choice to be a leader is a decision that comes first, but then Education to become a leader is a lifestyle , it's like choosing to be healthy, and at first it's usually a lot of hard work and a steep learning curve.

I have to change the way I eat and I have to go to the gym. I hate that and then you get fit and you feel good and you look good and your doctor is very happy with you and the worst part is that once you get fit you have to keep going to the gym and eating healthy for the rest of the time. your life is not something you achieve your goal and then stop, it is the choice to live a life that way even though it might have been a finite short term goal, leadership is the same, it is a lifestyle, It is a muscle that requires constant exercise and although you can study all the theory about leadership and you may have been good at it at some point if you don't maintain it, muscle atrophy and the problem is that there are too many people in leadership positions. leadership.

They would rather have authority than maintain the leadership lifestyle. They think that once they obtain a rank in Taoism, they would have certain powers and that is not the case. The good news is that there is a movement we are here talking about about leadership. We are changing the vernacular of what leadership means. We are using terminology like servant leadership. You hear more people demanding that their companies have a purpose. We talk about things like trust and cooperation in ways we didn't usually talk about them before. I haven't had a career in the 80s and 90s, I don't have any demand, but now I go on stages and call Jack Welch a bastard and people applaud that the movement is going in the right direction, so I'm optimistic, it took us between 30 and 40 years to get to where we are today it will take us 30 to 40 years to get to a more optimistic place, but that's why you're here, everyone here hasn't raised their hand and said "tell me why he's not one of us." , we are all we have to change the way we present ourselves as leaders we have to change the way we build our companies we have to change the way we present ourselves as employees I don't care if you work for a company with 10,000 people, if you work with someone on the left and you work with someone on the right, you can be a leader.

Leadership is the responsibility of those around us to see those around us grow and I think we are in good shape, we are moving in the right direction thanks for being a part. of this hello thank you for incredible hours a quick question about your third point which is about the adversaries were worthy adversaries worthy rivals yes and choose your rival in a more specific way if you are a challenger brand, for example, aha, do you choose another brand challenger that you consider worthy or is it the big incumbent who is not necessarily worthy, but a bigger rival?

Very often with challenger brands there is some kind of ideology that makes them all angry. first of all, just before you get excited and, although you are not competing against the model in office, its very existence keeps you honest about what your cause is, which is why one of the best things that has happened to the West was the Soviet Union because it reminded us of what we stood for because they existed and when they disappeared things got a little unsettling because we have to remember with no one to balance it out. Apple was really great when there was something important and Even people wonder what Apple stands for, now it's hard to discern, so if you're a challenger brand, the most important thing we're dealing with is the ideology, not the company, because if eventually you get big, you will have done it.

They didn't win, you didn't win, they just withdrew to satisfy America didn't win, the West didn't win the Cold War, the Soviet Union withdrew because they ran without the will and resources to stay in the game, the Cold War is alive. and well, I can tell you all about that, if you want Cold War 2.0, I have a whole theory, so if you are a challenger brand, then you have to know what you stand for and sometimes the easiest way to know what you stand for. What you stand for is having something that is different from what you represent, as you are a worthy rival, but you must maintain a strong ego because the goal is not to beat them, the goal is to spread your gospel and not theirs, it is a rival gospel. .

Yes, hi Simon, I'm Kirstie. I caught one of your Instagram ramblings back in October and I think he must have been finishing this book while you were questioning everything you were doing. I caught it very early in the morning here in Bodrum, in fact, you talked about why were you talking about vision and mission now that you have stated the five areas that you have brought to life as a group of leaders, managers, people who are noticing that there is a movement in the way we work and how we present ourselves? Being one area was something simple that we were able to learn tonight and that we could all start doing.

Those things I told you, you know you can't do existential flexibility without a just cause and I would say even trust the teams because otherwise everyone will panic and think you're crazy, a worthy rivalry like Just Cause and confident teams really are bigger than the rest. Existential flexibility is a capacity, so I think if there's one thing you can do, it's actually articulate what everything is. so the next question arises what is the difference between Just Cause and why right because I said start with why now I say start with Just Cause they are the same did you change the words in it? no, the Y comes from the past, the Y comes in the past is who you are is the reason the organization was founded is who you are as a human being is what drives you is immutable will never change no matter what happens in your life comes from looking back a just cause comes from looking forward it is an unrealized future that if your y2 came to life in the most magical way the world that would exist would be this world is the dream is the fantasy we have Call it vision because we can see it, so you have to be able to articulate what this world looks like in clearer terms than other people.

I can see that sounds amazing sign me up so challenge yourself and then there are multiple ways to do it. If everything we did was perfect, what would the world be like? What will we commit to helping build our organization or your life no matter how you want to see it? And then, the path to building trusting teams is the path of good leadership. that's what it is so commit to being the leader you wish you had yes hello you don't work here okay you can ask the question: hello Simon Yousef, nice to meet you sir first of all thank you for opening my mind and my thoughts to change.

I interest rate of leadership and a student of the infinite game thank you thank you continue - continue thank you second infinitely infinitely yes one question so far - hopefully they are simple how can a student of infinite theory work influence or transform a finite organization? and, I am really interested in understanding the military concept and I have heard it described several times and I have seen it on shows that show how the military can shape minds to the point where thatindividual will put the most precious thing in his life at stake for the partner, how can we create that in our organizations, not in the span of years, but in the span of weeks and months, like in the military?

Yeah, so let's answer those questions backwards, so one of the things that I have a deep admiration for the military and the admiration that I have for the military is exactly the same love and admiration that I have for artists is because they both set out on their paths knowing that they were not going to get rich and they felt that It was a calling and we are willing to sacrifice ourselves to move forward in this, whatever it is and to be a part of something, so for me it is the same, it is the same love and what I noticed immediately when I started hanging out with people in uniform.

If you and I have colleagues and coworkers, they have brothers and sisters, they literally refer to the people they work with as brothers and sisters and the relationship is brother and sister, so they can fight, but they try to attack me. brother or sister you have to go through me they love each other love is the word we use the Marine Corps calls them the intangibles true what makes the Marine Corps strong are the intangibles what they mean is empathy love devotion these these these soft words and you ask me a question like how do we do it in weeks and months?

It's, it's, it's, these are human beings we're talking about, so it's like asking me, can I give you some advice to help you fall in love? in a matter of weeks, instead of having to do all this like being vulnerable, I don't have any app for that, it's a damn slow process, sometimes you get lucky and you have a meeting of the minds and you have shared values ​​and it goes a little faster , but Even though we got really excited, we jumped into the relationship for three months where we were like, what was I thinking? There's no way to speed it up, it takes over a week, but if you've been doing something for seven years and you don't love it, maybe it's wrong right, I just don't know where it happens, so what I do know is that the way The way you build trust within an organization is exactly the same way you fall in love, right?

That is, you dedicate yourself to the care of another human being, sometimes sacrificing your own interests, it means that when the person you love comes to home from work and says: I had a terrible day and you had a wonderful day, you don't say a word about your wonderful day and you sit there and listen with love and empathy to their horrible day instead of waiting your turn to talk, you know what it means that you wake up in the morning, you say good morning before you check your phone, it's the little things that mean you learn to listen and do them and listening is really easy it means that you make the other person feel heard, so if you can learn all those things about how to make friends and how to fall in love, now go do all those things at work and when someone walks into the office they say: Oh my God! what's going on and you listen so they feel heard don't give them advice don't fix anything just listen well when they tell you how horrible it is you say it sucks tell me more true it's the same it's exactly the same and I promise I promise you that you will build those right relationships, you will fall in love with the people you work with and you will call them brothers and you will call them sisters and they were the same, they will say the same about you, that's how to do that and by the way, the military doesn't do it in 13 weeks, it What they do is create a foundation for it in 13 weeks, but it takes time for those relationships to really form and the first question was how do we do that?

Playing with an open mind in a finite game and in a company driven by finite leaders, that's the hardest of all, because we can't change the mindset of people two, three, four levels above us, as if there was nothing. that we can do, except if we adopt. infinite mindset is like preparing well it's like preparing for the eventual change where everyone else is it's like when the internet came along it's like most companies panicked but there was a small group of people like oh we saw this coming It's been a long time right, Netflix is ​​one of my favorite examples, so Netflix, do you remember we used to send each other DVDs in the mail and that's just because the streaming technology wasn't good enough yet, but you knew it was coming, of course, It was going to get better, so they had this? blockbuster of the subscription model, which was the number one video rental place in the world, their CEO went to the board and said, you know, we should probably do this subscription and the board said no because they were getting 12 percent of your income from late fees and look.

What happened, they are bankrupt and as soon as streaming got better, Netflix was there so what I urge you to do is keep your infinite mindset but perfect it but be good at it, practice leadership, don't worry about change people's minds, you can do it. Don't change, be the leader of the people around you and you can leave the company because you decide to, because they want you out because there are too many people who love you. I've seen that happen because of the way I've seen wonderful leaders get pushed. because they have too much loyalty and too much love towards them and the higher leaders threatened them.

I've seen it happen well, but be that person because it will change you. Here it is changing. I used to do these things. I used to have 30 people show it. Upstairs, we just filled the central hall, that's the movement, so keep it up because the revolution is coming, go this way, yeah, but you don't work here, you're just polite and well, he was there before me and you have to do it. Forgive me if I'm static, but I just realized how many people are here. I run and own a children's drama school and over the last few years with our older children, they have been through a lot, it's all about exams. except for things like that, so I've been subliminally professing your ideals and similar ones with Bob Chatham and Jim synagogue, etc.

Branson, and they found it very, very helpful, but when I try to talk to them about what their teachers and principals have the schools are doing for them, it seems that the schools that haven't done it yet seem to be going in the direction of adopting the finite results mentality, they impact, yes, and I spoke to one of their directors and I told them, well, they were very fast. to say look how many of our students got 6 at the beginning, look at the grades and I said, well how many more students were happy, they were studying, yeah, because there's no point in having results if the kids are dead at the end of the week and he .

It seemed to me like he was crazy, yes, so I thought, if you have any ideas about these things in the education system and any advice for apparent crazy people like me who are trying to rule you, right? They just told me that we are idealists. like it's a bad thing, yeah, yeah, yeah, so you know, one of the problems in schools is that we run our schools very similar to how we run businesses, which is to say, we've become more obsessed with metrics than with the education of the child. We know that we don't teach a curriculum, we teach children, you know, and education doesn't end when they leave school and the problem is that teachers don't feel cared for, school leadership is corporate leadership. model and it's not like principals haven't become obsessed with taking care of teachers because if you do it right, the teachers will take care of the students, don't worry, I say it all the time, you know, CEOs are not responsible for the results so why do you keep talking about you were responsible for the clients for the results that you are not responsible for the people responsible for the people responsible for the results?

There is no principal on the planet responsible for the children or the curriculum they are responsible for the people responsible for the curriculum and the children, and if you get that hierarchy right it works well, so if you have forward-thinking parents , you will look for a school that does that. If so, if you have no choice and you are in a school that has an old model, then the way you will raise your children and the way the type of pressures you will put on them will be slightly different. There is nothing wrong with teaching our children that they still have to do well in school.

You know that reality still exists. I'm not against reality, I'm just an idealist operating within it, but I think I definitely believe that we need school reform and I believe. We need to teach the fundamentals of leadership to anyone who aspires to be a principal. They promote him to that position. A big change is a charity that is doing it. Thanks for a great talk. My name was focused on the industry. I lead a project. I would like to call it a project about a business where we lead thousands of people who have aligned themselves to have values ​​that see the vision, there is a serious and great energy, but like any growing business or project, it is hungry and needs investment, whether from the banks or if it's from the stocks, our investors, my vision is infinite and I align with what you say like Malcolm departure, when is this, when is it. who have a finite game and since they have the purse strings they think they can control the show by trying to play a finite game against my infinite game, how do you handle it?

Because every time they ask me the exit, what is your exit plan? Well, it would probably be the coffin and the heart attack, but they don't take that seriously. How do you handle that infinite versus infinite finite players in this same project trying to control the strings? Do you have a say in your property? the company yes, you took their money yes, I have no problem I have no problem with you looking for investors but you took the number more than the investor, you took the one who offered you more money than the person who aligned with your values ​​who took the person who is investing in the exit instead of investing in you and your vision, yes, Berkshire Hathaway does not sell the stocks you buy, look for money from someone who believes in you and your vision and gives you the power of his wealth of experience and the people who work there to advise you instead of forcing you out makes sense.

Thank you. I feel like I need to apologize after that response. Hi Simon. Hello, thanks for the talk and thank you. I said my question too. the first four pencils you talked about seem to be really written by the cabin you talked a lot about, yes, and the university; a lot of people individually within the teams, the business is a scary thing, yeah, what would you see in Foster's cabin? something interesting or is it something that you really look for from the people around you, yes, so in my experience, courage is something external. I have had the opportunity to meet people who have risked their lives to save the lives of others and they did not have to do it, they were not, they would not have been blamed if they had not done it, they were not ordered to do it, they may have violated the orders, in fact, by doing so and I have had the opportunity to ask them why you did it. and almost unanimously they say because they would have done it for me and it is this feeling that someone has my back that gives me the courage to do something for them.

You know, if you're a world-famous tightrope walker and you'd like to try a brand. new act that defies death for the first time you are going to do it with a net it is not your skill that gave you the courage although you are very good at it it is the net it is this external thing that gave you the courage and you build it accordingly in such a way that I think that living with a heart of service, being that leader, that empathetic leader, what that engenders is that people begin to believe that you have their back, that you would do something for them, that you would sacrifice your interests to protect them, and miraculously they will do it again. do and the only thing that makes you a leader is that you are the one who went first, you are the one who took the risk first, right, that's the only thing that makes you, the leader, the leaders, not because you have the rank, we call you leader because you will literally lead, you led us, you went into the danger first to take the risk, you set the tone and people may have been cynical at first and you did it again. and they may have gone back to being cynical and you did it again and realized that wait, this is real and weird human things happen and they start offering you the same kind of love and trust.

I think it's external and I think it's based on the quality of human relationships, which means it doesn't happen overnight like in the military, they don't build trust in combat, it's not when they get off the plane with their rifles and ions, everyone trusts each other, it is in peacetime when your training and training and training and training and learning to love each other we Israelis one of the most successful armies in military history the unit you train with when You're 18 years old is your unit for the rest of your life, so when you're in your 40s and they call you back to the reserve, they're the same people you trained with when you were 18 because they understand that the bonds you ways when you're a kid they want those bonds throughout your army.

In their career they understand where confidence comes from, soI think that when we talk about human beings we forget that we are social animals. You know, there's a whole section in the bookstore called Self-Help. There is no section in the bookstore called helping others. and yet at the end of the day, we suck alone, like we're not as good alone, we're not as strong, we're not as smart, but if we're a team, together we can lift anything and solve any problem. not a single person on earth solved any problem by themselves, it never happened and even if it was their big brain, there was someone who believed in them, who gave them a break or funded them whatever, they didn't do it alone and I think it's our ability to foster relationships that underpins the courage we need to do all those hard things hi hi Simon, yes my name is Mark so it's a two part question: the first is when you get into organizations and talk to leaders and tell them about providing meaning and purpose to employees and they say, oh yeah, we have a wellness day, yeah, organized once a year, we've got that covered, yeah, what would you have to tell them?

The second thing is as the leader yourself I guess about the organization where you fail as a leader where you recognize that you fail as a leader let's ignore the second part of the question and talk about the first ah by the way it's half past eight I technically it's a thing of 75 minutes, so if you need to leave, you want to leave now is the good time, you want to defend yourself from me, but I will continue if you want to stay good, so the first thing people do when they tell me, well, we have a What we cover about wellness is my answer about consistency versus intensity, so if you stop brushing your teeth and only go to the dentist twice a year, your teeth will fall out.

Yes, they will. You can't go to the gym for nine hours. and you get in shape, but if you work every day for twenty minutes you get completely in shape. I just don't know when and the reason companies like intensity is because it's easy to measure. We had the event, we booked the speakers that we gave them. or certificate verification, they're all leaders right, but it's the little everyday things, it's not tons and tons of just innocuous things, that's what adds up. They like to brush their teeth. What does it mean to brush your teeth for two minutes?

It's of no use unless you do it. we do it every day, twice a day and it's the consistency that we forget, yes you need intensity, you still have to go to the dentist, but it's this balance of intensity and consistency, and a lot of companies think they can solve a problem with intensity and I challenge. They ask them to consider the issue of consistency, so I use the gym analogies and the tooth brushing analogies and they understand where I fail as a leader. Don't we have enough time like anyone else? I can succumb to fatigue. and then all the things I talk about I sometimes forget, especially when I'm writing a book.

I'm the worst because I'm I like teams, I'm like working with people. I work best when I work with people and writing a book is a very lonely process and I actually feel lonely so all these negative thoughts in Russian come to light and I'm very lucky to be able to do that. I have a couple of team members who tell me this, but the most important thing is that they put up a small barrier so that I don't hurt myself or others. Sometimes I'm too quick with decisions, like I'm too proud. that I can make great decisions, but sometimes it's too fast, sometimes I need to listen just one more minute, you know, to figure out what something is.

I am a work in progress, it is a work in progress, I am constantly learning by listening. Skill, it's a lot of fun. I took this listening course and this is what I learned. I learned that I am a good listener early with people I will never see again for the rest of my life, but with people I love and who are in my life. terrible, so when people say you're a bad list and I think I write the book of terrible, terrible, so I had to learn to take the skills that I know, but I actually apply them to the people that I love, so I'm getting better.

I'm improving a lot, you're welcome. I just want to finish. I think we're talking on the same stage in Greece and I also love Adam Grant. I didn't know he was talking about the scene in Greece, but amazing, who's next? Yes, let's go to the top back there Simon, thank you very much, thank you very much for the inspiring talk, thank you and you framed in a very Western way philosophies that, or you know, waste of life, lifestyles or actions that ring true to me in a in an Asian Context, be it yoga in South Southeast Asia or the Chinese mentality of a million liars, how do you feel about the current worldly environment and do you mean how in the West we are trying to win over China like a thousand?

The plan is the competition between the US and China in Asia Asia is far ahead of us Asia is playing an infinite game the Chinese are playing a game of course they are playing if in a game they are simply waiting for us, they make plans for literally hundreds of years we make plans for the next election cycle, yes, I think a lot of the things I talked about are strongly oriental and the idea of ​​an infinite Ness and an infinite life is strongly oriental, I'm sure you know, I think that we have this funny thing in the West, where we like things that we can understand easily and we don't like to use things that we don't understand, you know it well, you know it, you know, love is a complicated thing to understand, but I know it exists.

I don't have a metric for it. I can't measure it, but I know it's there. I love my children. I love my spouse. You know, show me the metric. Children. You know, they're pretty bad at school and a little annoying. ass and he hits his sister and you still love him I do, it's hard to say, it's hard to put it into metrics, it's hard to put it into rational things and I think Eastern philosophies embrace things that we don't understand any better than we do and it's about achieving that. right balance I think we do the same thing with medicine, which is we divide the body into two systems and you're an expert and whatever your system is and you know you're going to see an endocrinologist, it's clearly glandular, you know, I like it. the East.

Philosophies are also like you stick a needle in here and it helps your knee, why do you know it just works? Yeah, I think it's definitely a combination, for sure, and China is ahead. Hello, thank you for your wonderful speech. I had a question about I guess the general question about how to achieve happiness on a day to day basis, given the idea of ​​the infinite game, if you are in a workplace and like someone said before you have an infinite mindset, we are in a structure finite in a On a day-to-day basis, you may get a little demoralized when you have to work, when in reality you have the vision of doing something else, but you want to do tedious tasks that do not interest you.

Me personally, I'm just a student. I'm a 20 year old student and I'm doing engineering and I came to study, I guess with the idea that I want to create products that you know have an impact on people that change people's perspective on things and applications to help them well. our daily life a month of my university which is taking exams getting results so how can I avoid getting demoralized day by day while this changes for the future, you know? I make this distinction between joy and happiness happiness comes when you win the game when you get an A on your exam happiness comes when your number comes up in the lottery and then it disappears you know that feeling joy is something more underlying and you us.

How can I have happiness in everyday life? You won't necessarily enjoy the things you will do, but the question is: do you have the feeling that they are part of something bigger? That's where it is. Courage and joy come from you don't have to like them every day, but you can love them every day, you don't like your kids every day, but you love your kids every day, right? And I think we have this. created this unrealistic expectation that every day at work has to be amazing, like every day of your relationship has to be amazing and every day and your friendship has to be amazing, it's just not an unfair standard to impose on a human being who It is unfair. standard to set for an organization and sometimes it is us, sometimes the organization is trying very hard but we have a narrative in our head that we cannot let go of, that we are the ones who are creating the unhappiness every day, we become victims and everything you see.

There you will find all the evidence. Well, we can choose to change our narrative. You know, I have a friend who moved from a liberal city to a very conservative state city in the United States and she was very worried and I told her, "The most wonderful opportunity in the world," she says, but I'm going to hate all these people, I said, or you can learn to listen, understand what their motivations are and what they care about, and I bet you'll find that your values ​​are the same as theirs, right, part of their narrative, part of their perspective, you're not looking for happiness, happiness will happen here and there, you're looking for joy and that comes from relationships and belonging, and because oh I have to stop, I'll do one more, one more, hello.

Hello, first of all, I am exercising my courage here for you, sir, sorry, exercising my courage to come talk to you. Thank you. The first question is that I am a serial entrepreneur in the technology and gaming industry and I have also been building a YouTube channel with a cause to encourage more young girls to become entrepreneurs and also start their own companies in the gaming and technology industry, so I'd love to ask if it would be okay for me to interview you at some point. that's the first question I had to ask, sorry, I love it, do it right, so the second question is about scale, so right now my company has 70 people, each based in London and we've been doing quite well well, you know, from zero to ten, but obviously as we scale the leadership team and everyone in the organization needs to be multipliers of everything that me and my co-founders have been, you know, in stealing the organization, so are there some Ways to make sure we have scaling multipliers? -Hmm, fundamentally scale breaks things, you know, organizations can be like a family and then they had around 25 people and it starts to get very complicated and many organizations struggle to overcome that number because now you need structure and hierarchy. and things that just make normal businesses run well, plus you're not all friends anymore, you didn't all grow up together, the first group of employees like we were, we were actually friends, so you're up to 70 years old, you said you knew each other.

You can still know everyone's name, you can still refer to people when you max out at 150, then it gets really complicated and the scale just breaks things for human beings, we're just not built for this so the way What you do is with an effective hierarchy, you must have an effective training program to teach leaders and you must consider someone's leadership skills, there are not only results when you promote people and there must be an opportunity to learn to practice leadership, you have to teach it because You have to create the environment where you have people who can keep the organization running without you, we call it the school bus theory, which is what happens to your company if you get hit by a school bus tomorrow Well, everything will continue to work fine, hopefully. continue well, I hope it continues, so we rely on hope, hope is not a good business plan, right?

What if it will continue? Because the cause is very clear and everyone we hired believed in the cause, and even if they were. the most qualified person because we suspected that he or she did not share our values. I think not, of course, we didn't hire them at the time. There was someone who is toxic in the organization and we trained them, we trained them, we trained them and they proved to be incapable of training and even though they were the highest performing organization in the world and the salesperson sells more than anyone else we made the difficult decision to ask them to leave and they will find joy somewhere else they are a good person they just aren't a good fit but those are difficult decisions and those are the type of decisions that other people see you making and that you really believe in your cause more than your growth planning because the problem with growth plans is that they are arbitrary, you invented how big you want to be. in two years five years ten years it is literally a work of fiction true and then we all stagnate if it works or Danka we are not going at a good pace now yes those things are important good to have goals it is good to have things to achieve Yes, but they are there, they are there to push us, but no, they are not there to determine if where we have succeeded or failed, it is something that gives us the struggle because we are still visually driven annually. we're still like dopamine to drive us we still like short term things to help us it's not an infinite game it still includes finite games yeah so I think in order for you to scale you have to make surethat the people who are in leadership positions are not only good at their jobs, they are good leaders.

There is a lot of data on this that the best salespeople may not necessarily be excellent sales managers. There is no correlation. Excellent sales managers are good at getting sales. people should be at their natural best and they are fine without making any sales themselves, there is no correlation, so you are promoting your best leaders, you are promoting your best leaders and you better teach them how to lead once that you promote them, thank you very much. a lot to everyone