Building Moonshots

WAY 54Play an Infinite Game: Winning never ends, so losing is merely a temporary setback.

About the Way

As bestselling author Simon Sinek writes at the start of his book Infinite Games, “If there are at least two players, a game exists.”¹ There are finite games and infinite games. Finite games have fixed rules, which end when someone wins. Finite games include board games, poker, sports like football, races, politics, and wars. Infinite games continue play for the sake of playing, and there is no clear knowable beginning or ending. Infinite games include friendships or learning.

Chasing moonshots is more aptly an infinite game in which the rules, goals, and players continuously change across the long journey from idea to radically better world. In practice, organizations that are building moonshots are playing a series of finite games—such as, hiring its next genius team, achieving a needed breakthrough, putting a theory into practice, and delivering a new solution—inside of a vision‐led, infinite game. An infinite game is one that you play simply to play again, which is similar to the response that passionate leaders and innovators give when asked, “what makes you get of bed in the morning?”

In an oft‐told story, four years after a young Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer, he described how the company's goals were to amplify human abilities. This was a rather high ideal for a small company, essentially based in a Silicon Valley suburb, selling a new type of office and home ...