Daily pages - July 26, 2021

I’m reading The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, and it’s proving to be valuable.

It’s helping clarify the role of business, and I’m starting to understand that business is an institution, much like government institutions, and they are fundamentally meant to be advancing the infinite game. But since attitudes changed starting in the 70s, business has been played as though it were a finite game. That’s pretty much all of my adult life, so it’s not too surprising to me that I was confused about the nature of business. It seems like it’s always been greedy and selfish and geared toward making the rich richer at the expense of the employee and even the customer.

I looked hopefully at ideas like B-corps and social entrepreneurship as new ideas that might change the nature of business, but if Sinek’s narrative is correct, they are actually rebranding of what business used to be more about. At that connects to what Seth Godin talks about, both the opportunities that come from internet business opportunities, but that these kinds of small businesses can lead the way back to the infinite path.

In chapter 5 (I think), Sinek talks about how a business should treat all its stakeholders (employees, customers, c-level execs and shareholders) and it really reminded me of the statements I’ve made about how we want our institutions (aka our civilization) respond to change and challenge. I worded it that we wanted them to respond with empathy and compassion. Sinek talks about how employees and citizens of a country want (even entitled) “to feel psychologically protected at work, be fairly compensated for our effort and contribute to something bigger than ourselves.” (p. 90 kindle edition)

If I think about how Sinek’s book compares to mine, I think they are both talking to people who intuitively feel that there is something wrong with the way the world is being run. Sinek looks at it from the perspective of business, which is a very important angle given the impact that businesses have on the world. They’re often the biggest polluters and create some of the biggest malfunctioning systems. At the same time, they have provided wealth at a scale never seen before. It’s a bit of a relief that we don’t have the reinvent business from scratch. There are businesses that are operating within the infinite game, and we can learn from them. Where my book diverges is that I’m looking outside of the business world and looking for ways to engage people in the infinite game at a more personal level. Certainly one way to contribute is to get a job at (or start) a company that is advancing the infinite game. That is a perfectly valid approach. I might even want to add a pattern that talks about how to identify infinite businesses (with references to Sinek’s book) so that employment can be can be more carefully chosen as Work That Needs Doing rather than something that is just going to waste your time and energy. I also want to encourage people to follow the infinite path at a personal level and almost as a hobby. Or carry it into their government job, or improve their NGO so that it finds the infinite path.

It seems like there are a lot of people who think that business is going to save the world. Another group seems to think that technology (powered by government and business) will save us. I think of business and technology as part of the larger human-designed world that was created by us and our ancestors. If we constantly think that some abstract “business” or “technology” is going to save the day, it misses the fact that humans—we, the people—are business and technology. People are the engines of change, not the institutions we invented. Those institutions and technologies are extensions of us. They magnify our ability to create change, so we best make sure the change we’re making is a good one to start with and that the tools we are using to amplify our abilities are not distorting what we intended. I’m offering a way for each of us to reengage with world creation, simultaneously improving the world and ourselves in a virtuous cycle that could lead to a greater future than any of us can even imagine right now.