If you really want a business in life, you love my brilliant guest today has a new book that will help you create just that

Simon Sinek has a bold goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single day feeling inspired

Safe at work and fulfilled at the end of the day his first TED talk in

2009 rose to become one of the most watched TED talks of all time with over 43 million views and

subtitled in 48 languages

Simon is the New York Times bestselling author of start with why?

Leaders eat last together as better find your why and his latest book the infinite game, which is available now

Simon thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's nice to be back

Congratulations on the infinite game as I texted you I absolutely loved it. It's brilliant. I am curious

What was the inspiration to write this one?

So all of my work is semi autobiographical, you know

It's it's my own journey

start with why I was born out of the loss of my own passion for the work that I did and the

Rediscovery of it and I simply shared what worked for me

with my friends and my friends had me shared with their friends and before you know,

It it took on a life of its own and culminated in a book and a TED talk

Leaders eat last was born out of as my career started to

Grow, I started having trust issues with people simultaneously I spending time with folks the military and kept meeting people

Who would they trusted each other with their lives, you know, we we have colleagues and co-workers

They have brothers and sisters and I wanted what they had and I went to learn about them

Wanting what they had and realized it wasn't the people. It was the environment. It wasn't supposed to be a book

And this new book the infinite game

My entire life I've been

preaching a

version of work in which we

Or even just the way we live our lives in which we can wake up every morning inspired

We can feel safe at work and we can return home fulfilled at the end of the day and quite frankly it gets tiring when?

those in positions of authority or power or wealth

Keep telling me I'm naive or stupid or that I don't understand how business works and when I discovered this little book called

Finite and infinite games by James Carr see it completely

Should have it was a world is flat moment

I realized oh my god, the whole world is walking around thinking the world is flat and it's not it's round, you know

And I realized I'm not the naive one who doesn't understand how business works they are and it gave me this wonderful

Confidence that I am seeing the world through this infinite lens

And and so it ended up becoming another book. It's just the journey

So what I thought was interesting because I have read all of your books and I've really appreciated

And gotten so much benefit out of all of them when I was reading this one

I was like, oh, this is a new different version of Simon that I haven't recognized in his writing before in the tone

Manure always brilliant always so smart

There was an incisive 'no sand there was a bit of like a little fire and spunk. I was like this feels different

Did you notice that while you were writing it? Oh, yeah, actually to tone it down a bit

You know, I think

I think what's so different about this book compared to the others is that the first two books I was making a case I made

A case for this thing called the why and I made a case for this thing called a circle of safety. I made this case

For that trust is environmental here. I'm not making a case for the existence of the infinite game James Carr

See did that, you know, I explain the infinite game in the first couple pages and it's it's understood

Hey, but it raises this interesting point which is we live in a world in which we are players and infinite games

There's no such thing as winning marriage, you know, no nobody in the marriage is declared the winner

And there's no winning and friendship and there's no winning global politics and there's definitely no such thing as winning business

Right, but when we listen to the language of too many leaders

They talk about being number one beating the being the best or beating the competition, but there's no such thing

There's no such thing because we don't have an agreed-upon timeframe and we don't have agreed-upon metrics

We get to decide the time frames in the metrics, so there can't be winners

and so when we play with a finite mindset in the infinite game

there's a few very consistent and predictable things that happen the decline of trust the decline of

cooperation the decline of innovation and the eventual demise of the organization

so

The I wasn't trying to convince people to be of the infinite game it it simply answered the very obvious question

Okay, if we're players in the infinite game and my entire life

I've been taught to play the finite game and all of the pressures and standard business practices reinforce the finite game

Then how do we lead in the infinite game?

And that's what I wrote and it's it's not supposed to convince the people who think I'm naive or think. I'm stupid

I don't understand the business how business works

It's supposed to be a rallying cry for all of us who feel uncomfortable the way business is working yet

We keep our opinions to ourselves because there are people who were way more senior and way

Wealthier than we are so they must know something but it still feels uncomfortable

and so I wanted it to be I

Wanted it to be a rallying cry for all the people who just don't like the way it works

They can't put their finger on it. They don't have the words for it, but they know something's wrong

This can't be the way business should work

And it's also to help us recognize

who the finite players are because we have the right to know who is playing and

Using our lives and our livelihoods to manage their books

We have the right to know

and so it's it's it exists for two reasons one is to be a rallying cry for those who who think there's a

different or a better way and and a filter so that we can recognize who the finite players are so we can

Change our behavior, or at least keep our guard up

when we when we do business with them, yeah, I thought another

Kind of frame that was so interesting was just as a self-correcting mechanism for ourselves, you know

Because so much of society as you shared has kind of taught us

We're playing an infinite game

But we're really not and so if we find ourselves

Veering off into that realm or finding ourselves feeling uncomfortable or running our business ways. Like we must be the best

it's like

Oh

We can kind of do the check yourself before you wreck yourself thing and get back into another

Entire frame of seeing the world and of behaving I thought one of the stories that was so illustrative

And I was wondering if you could share it here was when you were speaking at an educational event

For Microsoft and then speaking at an educational event for Apple because it's so beautifully illustrated

This incredible contrast

I didn't know it at the time but in hindsight, I see the difference in mindsets and it's a

Basically, I spoken at an education summit for Microsoft and Apple a few months apart

And as I sat in the audience for the Microsoft event

The vast majority of the executives spent the vast majority of their presentations talking about how to beat Apple

At the Apple Summit a hundred percent of the 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

The other one was obsessed with beating the competition

At the end of my Microsoft talk that gave me a gift. They gave me the news Zune when it was a thing. This was

Microsoft's response to the

IPod and this little piece of technology that they gave me was fantastic. I mean, it was really brilliant

It was beautifully designed. It worked flawlessly. The user interface was simple and intuitive. It was really well done

Anyway at the end of my Apple talk

I was sharing a taxi with a senior Apple executive and of course I couldn't help myself

I had to stir the pot and and I turned him and I said

you know Microsoft gave me their new Zune and

it is so much better than your iPod touch and he looks at me and he says I have no doubt and

the conversation was over and

basically, the infinite minded player understands that sometimes your product is better and sometimes their product is better and there's no such thing as

Best, you know, there's a head and behind and the goal is not to beat your competition

The goal is to last your competition and the only true competitor in the internet game is yourself

How do we make our products better this year than they were last year?

How do we make our culture stronger this year than it was last year. How do we

Improve the quality of our leadership training and make it better this year than it was last year

It's it's and we use we use the other players in the game as benchmarks for sure as worthy rivals

But um, but we're not out to beat them or compete against them

We're simply we're simply competing against ourselves, which is an entirely new way to understand our our place in the game

Feels so much more free feels healthier. It feels more exciting

When I was reading the book those were all of the emotions that filled me up when I was

Imagining into an infinite game and also

recognized in myself

where in the past like oh

Here's where I was playing a finite game. And here's why that felt really shitty

Here's why you know it and just going like wow, I could look at this wonderful framework again

Relationships like even outside of business obviously our careers and businesses where many of us spend the vast majority of our waking time

But you can see it everywhere and that's why I think this is just so useful because it's so brilliant

but we can use it in every facet of our existence you shared in the book when we play with an

Finite mindset in the infinite game. We will continue to make decisions that sabotage our own ambitions

Sure so you know every

Business has a vision. Hopefully it's a proper vision and not just some goal

You know to increase top-line revenues by X is not a vision

It's just a goal a vision is something distant and idealized and something that's ostensibly unachievable

But we devote our entire lives to working towards it to making progress towards it

and the problem is when we play within a

finite mindset we become so obsessed with the short-term and we become so obsessed with what everybody else is doing and we sometimes

Change the course of our own strategy

to respond

To what one of the other players has done

Sometimes getting angry when they have success

And it makes us really really

myopic in our view of of how to build a business and in the course of the time we will both

waste the will and resources that are required to stay in the game the resources because we're gonna spend money needlessly on things that don't

Matter and the will because it takes its toll on us and on the people who work with us

It's tiring to work with people like that. Yes, and good people leave

and so when you exhaust the will and resources of your own organization

by

necessarily you sabotage your own ambitions, you know, I I believe that that for the most part not always but for the most part

Bankruptcy is usually an act of suicide

It's an it's it's it's a it's a it's an inability to build structure

it's and an ability to think tournaments and an ability to gnaw to build teams and

For so many organizations, especially big ones success ones that go bankrupt

They love to blame the market or a disruption

But it was there an ability to to foresee that these things were going to happen because other people for soul

for example

Look at look at the struggles that the music industry is having these days

With the rise of the Internet and yet it was a computer company that invented iTunes. Why not the music industry?

It was Amazon that invented Amazon and the e-reader why not anyone from the publishing industry like they didn't even invent the Kindle, you know

Why is it that that Netflix showed up and how can the movie and television industry didn't invent Netflix and

it's because they were so busy protecting their existing business models that

They fail to see that the world was changing around them

it was a lack of foresight now, they're forced to change which is different that's defenses versus offensive a

fun little story

Is as Netflix was this little small company. It was experimenting with subscriptions

And you remember we used to get DVDs in the bath and we knew streaming was on its way

But the technology wasn't there quite yet

but they were preparing with this subscription model and

Blockbuster, which was the 800-pound gorilla if you wanted to rent a DVD in those days pretty much

We all went to Blockbuster. It was the only national chain of any worth

and

the CEO of

Blockbuster went to the board and said I think we really should

experiment and start looking to the subscription model and the board would not allow him to change the pricing models because the company made

12% of its revenues from late fees

Now blockbuster doesn't exist and Netflix

Basically dominates the industry

That's why I call it an act of suicide now

The people at blocks our blockbuster will say it was disruption in the internet, but it was their own foolishness and blinded and blindness

They can find it game playing a fighting game. Actually, they weren't blind. They were actually fully aware. They chose to ignore

they were playing a finite game that couldn't they couldn't bear the thought of letting go of 12% of revenues in the short term to

live on forever

So it cost them the whole company. I thought there was another brilliant descrip distinction

Excuse me between building a company for stability versus building a company for resilience

Yeah

isn't that you know because I struggled with this as I was writing, which is

Which is an infinite minded organization an infinite minded leaders there

They're more than stable and you because the word stability and stable is already used in business, you know

Is this a fast growth within a high-risk company or is this a more stable investment?

You know and stability is the ability to weather a storm

But the way you weather it is you come out basically looking the way you did when you went in

Yeah, that's stability

You know, there's a building there's a storm the building's still there resilience to me is something more profound

Which is the ability to adapt with change?

and and you may come out a completely different organization as a result of change and I think that

Adaptability is way more important in the infinite game because stability eventually runs out of steam

And we've seen stable companies go go belly-up all the time

Resilience is adaptability

One of the best examples I think is the company Victorinox. It's a you remember the Swiss Army knife