How Simply Just “Playing To Win” is a Losing Business Strategy
Instead, adopt an infinite product mindset, every time.
During the past 12 months, I’ve been struggling to reconcile in my mind whether I prefer designing product strategy within a business environment of uncomfortable uncertainty or relative stability.
I previously wrote about how to create product strategy from scratch, referencing Roger Martin’s Strategy Choice Cascade. Roger believes that no more than five key questions should be answered by a product leader to succinctly summarise their strategy:
What is our winning aspiration?
Where do we play?
How will we win?
What capabilities are required?
What management systems are needed to fulfil this strategy?
However, Step 3 begins to introduce a problem that has been made more difficult to answer in the face of pandemic uncertainty:
How do we “Win” in a game with no finite rules, or with rules that are changing constantly?
When a game has finite rules, the outcome is measurable and the end is clearly understood. Yet, when the rules of the game are changing constantly, we don’t have any objective measure to compare success. Simply put, there’s no objective way to “win”.
Example: A Constantly Changing Rubik’s Cube
To illustrate this problem, imagine your business is a Rubik’s cube handed to you. You know: that famous 3D puzzle with 6 faces each containing 9 coloured squares (called ‘facets’) per face. Your strategy to “win” is to rotate your cube’s facets to ensure that all tiles have the same colour per face as fast as possible, in an effort to beat your competitors to the finish line.
You spend many days practising all the moves in the book and begin rotating your cube. All of a sudden, your facets start changing colour in an unpredictable manner, even when you aren’t making moves. Perhaps at some angles, you may think you’ve won. At other angles, you have completely mismatched tiles that you may seem nervous to touch in fear of it setting your progress back to the beginning.
If there’s anything we have learned in this past year during a global pandemic is that most of the time, there are no fixed rules in business. The rules of the game can be rewritten at any given time. Simon Sinek describes this business phenomenon as the “Infinite Game”, where:
There are many players — even some you don’t recognize as players
There are no fixed rules on how to play — other than acting legally, there are infinite ways to conduct business
There is no agreed-upon objective — one person’s definition of success is most likely not another’s
There is no end — when a player leaves the game, the game continues.
Product leaders may find it tempting to work on features to bring products to ‘feature parity with our closest competitors, but this is narrow and limited only to short term results at best.
For a longer-term sustainable competitive advantage, Sinek argues leaders must aim higher and work move towards advancing an unwavering purpose, instead of applying a defensive “me too” approach that purely just defends market share through offerings that ultimately spiral downwards to a commoditised offering across each player.
Examples of the Finite Player in an Infinite Game
There are clear examples of products that have failed to gain traction due primarily to Finite thinking, whether to compete on similar features or purely on price. Let’s take a look at some of my favourites!
🔥 The Amazon Fire Phone
Amazon’s first flagship smartphone, the Amazon Fire Phone, was launched in 2014 in an effort to compete against heavyweights Google (Android) and Apple (iPhone/iOS). As seen in the product description above, the key features that were being marketed were dynamic 3D perspective background images, and Firefly tagging allowing users to easily identify (and buy) worthless products seemed to benefit Amazon but did not solve painful user problems.
To appeal to a user and gain mass adoption, a smartphone usually needs to solve two problem areas: incredible design, for which constant user feedback and technical innovation is needed, or irresistible price often through cost leadership. The Fire Phone had neither.
➕ Google Plus
Google Plus (Google+) launched in 2011 in an effort to compete with Facebook and Twitter, following its previously failed attempts in Google Buzz (retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (retired by March 2012), and Orkut (acquired but retired by end of 2014).
Google+ was launched as an invite-only platform in June 2011, before opening up to the public later in the year. It contained similar features to Farebook and Twitter: the ability to post content (text and photos), status updates, and individual feeds. There was also functionality that allowed a user to define “circles” of trust, where messages only went to users within those circles.
While the platform saw plenty of sign-ups, the platform failed to engage and retain users as there was no element of virality, habituation, nor any A-ha moment. Simply put, there were no compelling reasons for someone to continually use the product if most of their friends are already using Facebook or another platform.
Google even attempted to push it upon its YouTube community requiring all comments to require a Google+ account to comment on YouTube content, much to the behest of its users, who felt their success was being used to uplift the struggling social platform. In 2018, Google announced it would shut down Google+ to consumers.
🍹 New Coke
“If it ain't broke, don’t fix it!” — Bert Lance
Such a quote could have been a question posed to Coca-Cola executives before they launched a “new and improved” flavour formula called “New Coke” in 1985. The flavour profile was sweeter and flatter, remarkably familiar to its fast-growing competitor at the time, Pepsi.
Pepsi’s growth in the early 1980s and 1990s was partly due to some more modern marketing campaigns, including the “Pepsi Challenge” that asked customers to take blind taste tests, only to be surprised to learn they preferred the flavour of Pepsi over the incumbent, Coca-Cola.
In an effort to serve both Pepsi’s and Coca-Cola’s customer tastebuds simultaneously, it failed to capture either one. The company received almost 10,000 calls a day from angry customers. Less than three months later, and the original formula (branded Coke Classic) was back on the shelves with sales going through the roof. In fact, their market position improved over Pepsi as consumers rediscovered their attachment to the iconic brand.
🎵 Microsoft Zune
Last and not least, The Microsoft Zune: an MP3 player launched in 2006, created with the aim of competing with Apple’s iPod and iTunes business, which launched 5 years earlier. The functionality of the Zune was on par with the iPod Classic in battery life and storage, with some added features in its colour OLED display, WiFi and FM Radio capabilities.
Unfortunately, the differentiating features simply weren’t enough to attract a larger audience to adopt the Zune. While Apple had the brand perception of an innovative technology design company, Microsoft was perceived by the media as the 2nd mover, and the inventor of an “iPod Killer”.
For example, the Zune-to-Zune song sharing feature allowed one Zune to send music over WiFi to another. which effectively would require a customer to effectively leave the Apple ecosystem to adopt this feature. This barrier to adoption was simply too high for a user who identified more to the innovative and exceptional design culture of Apple.
Within the first 9 months, the Zune could only amasse 1 million sales. In the same period, Apple announced that worldwide sales of iPods had topped 100 million.
The Infinite Mindset
Sinek believes that a leader who sees their business as part of an infinite game will make strategic decisions that will endure in the longer term. Conversely, a leader who plays a finite game will aim for short-term wins that might weaken her organization in the long run.
I highly recommend reading Sinek’s book from start to finish, but if you’d like to know my take on the Top 5 attitudes to adopt to ensure you have the mindset of an Infinite Game leader, read below!
1. Advance a bigger “Just Cause”
Sinek contents that Leaders should define a Just Cause, your reason for being. This is a cause SO important that you would willingly sacrifice personal interest to advance it. Conversely, Finite-thinking leaders may instead prefer to take short term gains at the expense of impacting their longer-term success.
An example of finite thinking is when a product leader receives a feature request, that, if accepted, would result in significant upfront implementation revenue, but when launched, would drastically reduce user engagement and retention. Infinite players will tactfully reject this request every time.
Setting the right vision statement can empower teams to explore breakthrough ideas without losing sight of the goal. For a primer on how to set your compelling vision and just cause, check out Paavan’s article describing how to adopt the IBM Hills Framework.
Not all companies can absorb losses for such a long time in order to advance their just cause. Early-stage companies that lack the capital or positive operating cash flows will be extremely tempted to say yes, simply to survive. In the infinite game, companies are always moving towards their higher vision with the understanding that they may never even get there.
2. Foster trusting self-empowered teams
According to Sinek, the most common reason employees don’t meet performance standards is because their leadership hasn’t created a trusted environment.
Sinek cited his personal experiences talking with a barista at a hotel who held two jobs: one at the cafe, and one at the nearby higher-paying hotel. He genuinely loved his cafe job more purely due to positive managerial support. He viewed his other job at a casino as merely collecting a paycheck, because management didn’t treat him as a trusted team member.
There are many ways to show your team you trust them. One way is to provide autonomy, competence (e.g., budget for training), and relatedness (e.g., sense of purpose, meaning and connection to just cause), per Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory I wrote about previously.
3. Admire worthy rivals, but don’t copy them blindly
There’s nothing more motivating than a worthy competitor, provided we use our admiration of them to fuel our own continuous improvement. A worthy rival is a competitor who is noticeably better at specific things, and who can therefore reveal ways that your company can improve, enabling you to better survive in the infinite game.
Sinek talked about being on stage with someone he considered a major rival. The eye-opening moment for Sinek was when he introduced his rival by saying:
“You make me feel insecure. All of your strengths are all of my weaknesses.
He turned to me and said: Funny, I feel the same about you!”
— Simon Sinek
Sinek believes that companies should never centre corporate strategies around the shorter-term definable threats posed by rivals, as Microsoft did against Apple when launching the Zune. Instead, companies should explore opportunities or develop innovations that might strengthen the organization as a whole, in line with their Just Cause.
4. Practice existential flexibility
Instead of protecting their company’s current business model, Sinek advised leaders have existential flexibility, where you are able to make a purposeful and dramatic change that ensures you stay true to their Just Cause. It’s a move that pushes them out of their comfort zone and carries a risk of failure but is necessary in order for them to continue playing the infinite game.
An example is when Nintendo launched their Nintendo Switch console, what we now know as a perfect hybrid between an at-home entertainment system that could also be played as a handheld device. Just years prior to the Switch launching, Nintendo struggled to sell units of their Wii-U, the successor of their popular party games console of the Wii.
The Wii-U featured a large touch-sensitive game controller that could double up as a TV screen away from the console but could only receive high definition content if within 25 feet range of the core console unit. The controller was an attempt to compete against the rising tablets and smartphone market at the time but strayed too far from the core reason why the original Wii was successful: delightful multiplayer gameplay.
The Wii-U sold just under 14 million units in its lifespan between 2012 and 2017. Conversely, the Nintendo Switch has sold over 84 million units since its launch and is still the preferred console to purchase today. It has become the console that stayed true to Nintendo’s Just Cause of delightful single and multiplayer experiences whether indoors or outdoors, for both casual and heavy-duty gamers.
5. Have the courage to lead even amidst uncertainty
Leading courageously means working toward a better future, even if doing so puts your own career in jeopardy. Sinek likened the infinite mindset to going to the gym: once people reach one goal, they shouldn’t just stop there, they should defining new goals and embrace the pain that may ensue from goal to goal.
Sinek describes Infinite-minded leaders as those who find safety in relationships, which are much more complex to navigate rather than strictly defined rules that may constrain creativity and lateral thinking. Spending time to build trust can be uncertain and difficult, but is far more effective as it builds the muscle memory on how to deal with uncertainty today and in future.
“If we can learn to embrace infinite mindsets, not only have we increased and enhanced innovation, seen trust and cooperation thrive, but we’ll actually love our jobs.
At the end of our life we’ll look back and say I was a part of something bigger than myself.” — Simon Sinek
Final Thoughts
Provided above are some short examples of how finite players make the wrong decisions when they are in fact within an infinite game. We then discuss the top 5 attitudes that can make us all leaders with infinite mindsets:
Advance a bigger “Just Cause”
Foster trusting self-empowered teams
Admire worthy rivals, but don’t copy them blindly
Practice existential flexibility
Have the courage to lead even amidst uncertainty
I’m keen to know more examples of whether you’ve needed to perform a significantly challenging existential pivot, or whether you’ve convinced finite players around you to successfully become more infinite in their thinking.
I would love to hear about your approaches to implementing infinite thinking in your organisations! Share some of your tips by placing a comment below, or by finding me on my usual social spots: Twitter and LinkedIn.