[Applause] Thanks very much. January 1968, the North Vietnamese Army launched a surprise attack against American forces. We know this was the Tet Offensive. Tet is the Vietnamese equivalent of Christmas, and for decades there was a tradition in Vietnam that there was never any fighting on Tet, much like the ceasefires during World War I on Christmas, except in this particular incident in 1968, the Vietnamese forces decided to break with tradition, overwhelm the American forces, and hopefully bring a swift end to the war. And that's exactly what they attempted to do. They threw 85,000 troops attacking over 125 US and allied targets across the country, and they caught the Americans completely by surprise. Many of the commanding officers were not even at their posts. They were in town celebrating Tet, expecting there to be no fighting. Here's the amazing thing: the United States repelled every single attack thrown at them over the Tet Offensive, every single one. Most of the major fighting had ceased after about a week. It went on for about

a month, but most major fighting had ceased after about a week. After which, the Americans had lost fewer than a thousand troops. The North Vietnamese lost 35,000 out of the 85,000 troops that they, with which they attacked. And if we look at the Vietnam War as a whole, the United States lost 58,000 people over the course of ten years. Where the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, lost three million people over the course of ten years, which is a population equivalent at the time of the United States losing 27 million of our own population, just to put it in perspective, right? And if we look closely at the Vietnam War, the United States actually won the vast majority of the battles they fought and most of the major battles that we fought. So, it raises a very interesting question: how do you decimate your enemy, win all the important and lose the war? As it turns out, we don't fully understand, or at least there are multiple definitions about winning and losing means. If you have at least one competitor, you have a game.

are two types of game there are finite games and there are infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and an agreed-upon objective football. We all agree what the rules are before we begin play. We all agree that whoever has more points at the end of the set time period is the winner and everybody goes home at the end right. The game has a beginning a middle and an end. In an infinite game there are known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game or stay in the game as long as possible. When we pit a finite player versus a finite player the system is stable football is stable. When we pit an infinite player versus an infinite player the system is also stable. The Cold War was stable because we could not have a winner or a loser and what ends up happening is the players play until one drops out because they have they lack the resources or the will to continue to play they run out of the will and resources the game continues.

with them or without them the player just leaves the game. Right problems arise however when you pit a finite player versus an infinite player because one is playing to win and the other is playing to keep playing and they make profoundly different strategic choices which ultimately results in the finite player finding themselves in quagmire running through will and resources trying to win and this is what happened to the United States in Vietnam. It's not so much that the Americans lost the Vietnam War. It's that they were fighting the wrong game because the Americans were trying to beat the North Vietnamese where the North Vietnamese were fighting for their lives and a very different set of strategic choices was made and invariably the United States will find themselves in quagmire and out of the will or the resources to play that in lose they dropped out of the game. Right now this gets me thinking about other contexts in the world in which we live business politics even education. Right which is what game are we playing right there's no such thing as winning.

business, there's no such thing as winning global politics, and there's definitely no such thing as winning education. But if we listen to the language of too many organizations, they don't know the game they're in. They talk about being the best, they talk about being number one, they talk about beating their competition. The problem is there's no such thing, and any metrics that we choose, whether it's a ranking in a magazine that has made arbitrary choices about how to rank your universities and colleges (you had no say), or one university that declares itself number one in X, and another one that declares themselves in Y, we haven't agreed upon the timeframes of the metrics. In other words, it's all smoke and mirrors, right? Which means if you're playing by those rules, it's becoming more and more difficult to maintain the resources to stay in the game. Money is becoming more difficult, that's becoming what seems to be the primary objective, which it never was, and even the will of the people to commit their blood, sweat, and tears to

see that your organization advances into the future. In other words, the staff, the teachers, even the students. It becomes more and more difficult. Let me give you a real-life example that sheds some light on what I'm talking about. I spoke at an education summit at Microsoft. I also spoke at an education summit at Apple. At the Microsoft summit, 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 a hundred 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 their competition. Guess which one was in quagmire. At the end of my talk at Microsoft, they gave me a gift. They gave me the new Zune when it was a thing. This was Microsoft's response to the iPod, and this little piece of technology was absolutely incredible. It was beautifully designed, the user interface was intuitive and very simple to use.

was really brilliant. I have to say. So at the end of my Apple talk, I was sharing a taxi with a very senior Apple executive, employee number 54 to be exact, and I decided to stir the pot. I couldn't help myself. I turned to my said, You know, Microsoft gave me their new Zune, and it is so much better than your iPod touch, to which he said, I have no doubt. And the conversation was over because the infinite player understands sometimes your competitor has the better product, and sometimes you have the better product, and sometimes you're ahead, and sometimes you're behind. But there's no such thing as best or first or beating your competition. There's only ahead and behind. And the reality of an infinite game is you're actually only competing against yourself. That the objective every single day is how do we become a better version of our own institution this year than we were last year. How do we improve the quality of our culture? How do we improve the quality of the way we provide the service that we claim to

be providing. How do we improve ourselves? That is the main point of being in an infinite game because at the end of the day, we don't have the same metrics as everybody else, and we're not even necessarily playing to the same ends. So the question is, how do you play an infinite game? There are five pieces. It's a checklist, literally. You have to check them all off, and if you don't have them all checked off, you eventually slide back into the finite game. Here's what they all run through them quickly, and then give you a little more depth on each of them. Number one, you have to have a Just Cause. Number two, you have to have courageous leadership. Number three, you have to have teams. Number four, you have to have a worthy rival. And number five, you have to have a flexible playbook. Okay, let's run through them really quickly. What is a Just Cause? So I'll ask you a very simple question. Why does your organization exist? We don't need you. Clearly, there's plenty of competition. Clearly, people

have plenty of choices. Even the things that you may specialize in, there are others that do a reasonably good job. They might even be better than you in some areas. So why do you exist? Providing education is table stakes. Everybody here does that. You can't rely on that. That's why the industry exists, not why your organization exists. That's like when I talk to healthcare companies and say, Why does your organization exist? And they say, To help people be more healthy. Like, no kidding, thank you. But I know that the culture of one organization is different than the culture of another organization. There are cultural norms that wrap around the sense of purpose, cause, or belief. Great organizations understand their just cause. They cause so just that people would be willing to sacrifice to see the advancement of that cause. Sacrifice comes in many forms. It might mean working longer hours, giving you my best ideas, turning down a better job that offers me more money to stay here because I believe in what you're doing and I want to see that advanced. One of my favorite examples of

A Just Cause is the Declaration of Independence. Our founding fathers declared, literally wrote down, they declared why we needed our own country. All men are created equal, endowed with these unalienable rights, amongst which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They were never against Britain. The whole point is not to be against something, but to stand for something. Britain was simply standing in the way of them advancing their cause. And though they won independence, there are always finite games within the infinite game. Though they won independence, that didn't mean that they had now provided all men are equal. Now the real heavy lifting began. Now let's be crystal clear. When they said all men are equal, what they meant was white Protestant men. Let's be crystal clear. But even early on during the Revolutionary War, George Washington understood how limiting that was, and he realized that they had to have a broader definition. So he included Catholics. He banned any organizing against Catholics in his armies, and he would regularly attend Mass to send the right message. Sometime later, we abolished slavery and

the 14th amendment. Sometime later, we had women's suffrage. Sometime later, we had Civil Rights Act. Sometime later, we implemented gay rights. And you can see that we are striving to provide this thing called all men are equal. People are equal. And though we will never actually get there, we will die trying. And the obstacles may always be different. And what a Just Cause is, it is a vision of the future that does not yet exist. And you will commit all of your energies to advance that vision of the world that you have and the people you want to attract, both those who work there, those who teach there, and both those who come to learn there, believe in your vision of the future so much so that they may turn down a better offer of sons from someone else because they want to be around people who are committed to building this world that does not yet exist. And every single single one of these organizations that you run and represent can have different visions or overlapping visions of the world, but you must be clear what your Just Cause is, what you stand for.

otherwise, the only thing I have to judge you on is superficial things. It's like dating, right? It's like dating. If somebody tells me what they stand for, who they are, they're talking about their character, and those are the people we want to spend the rest of our lives with. If we do not have any sense of who they are, what they stand for, what their purpose, what their cause, what their beliefs are, what their values are, the only thing we have to judge them on is how much money they make and how good-looking they are. And that's what we end up, unfortunately. In so many university systems, we are judging based on superficial things, right? And it hurts me when I even see universities advertised because they talk about table stakes, getting an education, getting ahead. No kidding, thank you. Nobody goes to university to get behind. Like, I knew that without you, without your advertising. Or worse, you advertise what the starting salaries will be once you graduate. Seriously, that's where we're beginning. You're starting to sound like investment banks who advertise what your

bonus will be, which means you attract people who want bigger bonuses rather than idealists and ideologues who going to commit time and energy to impact the world. And if they're not learning it at university, where are they learning it without a just cause? We start feeding people what they want rather than what they need. Ted Koppel talks about this in the news. He says we used to give people the news they needed whether they wanted or not. Now we give people the news they want whether they need it or not. And I don't have to go into the polarizing nature of news in America today and what a vicious cycle that creates and these echo chambers. I would argue that universities are leaning towards that same direction. We're giving people the classes they want whether they need them or not and we sometimes avoiding giving them the classwork they need whether they want it or not. Real important things that will help advance your just cause but more important will help advance them as human beings because I can tell you in my work the people who

make choices based on salary alone, end up unhappy, end up in broken marriages, and end up doing rather unethical things because they're so driven by the mighty dollar. Why aren't we teaching people? Let's put that in affirmative. You should teach. I strongly urge you to include things like confrontation, effective confrontation, communication skills. You've heard on this panel already from younger generations with increasing rates of anxiety, increasing rates of depression, increasing rates of suicide. We're seeing it in these school shootings where something like 80% of them are perpetrated by kids, by children who are lacking good relationships. It's human relationships that are missing. I'm seeing it in the business world every single day, and what this drives as more and more short-termism. What do you stand for, and will you attract people who believe what you believe? Number two, it's embarrassing this has to be on the list. Courageous leadership. Courageous leaders are the ones who are willing to sacrifice the short term in order to advance the long term. Courageous leaders

are the ones who willing to say no to the money because it's coming from a dirty source, and rather say yes even though they know they'll have to tighten the belt in the short term, because it's the right thing to do having a Just Cause. If we don't actually follow the just cause, we don't actually make decisions through the lens of the just cause, it's just marketing. It's just marketing. I'll give you my favorite example right, the IOC, the International Olympic Committee. They have a mission statement, what they believe is their Just Cause, which is to advance the world, make the world a better place through sport, but for the fact that they're all corrupt. It's a great idea. My point is, is you actually have to have leadership that desperately, profoundly believes in the cause and will make decisions to advance that cause. They would sooner sacrifice their own personal interests to take care of their people. They would never sacrifice their people to protect their own interests. It's called leadership. It's called leadership. We confuse rank.

and leadership rank has nothing to do with leadership. I know many people who sit at the highest levels of organizations who are not leaders. They have authority, and we do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And yet, I know many people who sit at lower ranks who have no authority, and yet they have made a choice - the choice to look after the person to the left of them and the choice to look after the person to the right of them. And we would trust them and follow them anywhere. Leadership is the acceptance of the awesome responsibility to create an environment in which people can work at their natural best. The senior-most people in an organization are not responsible for the results. They are just not right. It's like talking to hospital administrators, and I say, What's your priority? and they say, My patients. Really? You're not a doctor, and if you are, you haven't talked to a patient in 20 years. Wrong. The responsibility of the senior people in a hospital is to take care of the staff, the doctors, and the

nurses, and when they feel taken care of, they will in turn take care of the patients. The responsibility of everyone in this room is to take care of the people who work in the organization. And if they feel that someone has their back, they will commit all of their excess energy and time to take care of the students and each other. If they do not feel that their backs are protected, that someone has their interests in mind, that the organization itself is trying to help them advance as human beings, then they will do exactly what the culture provides them for to do, which is they will protect themselves from you. Which then goes to the next point of trusting teams. A trusting team is an environment in which people feel safe to raise their hand and say, I made a mistake. I don't feel qualified to do the job you've asked me to do, and I need more training. I need help. I'm struggling at home, and it's affecting my work. I'm scared, without any fear of humiliation or retribution or punishment whatsoever.

you do not have trusting teams inside your organization. What you do have is a group of people who show up to work every single day lying, hiding, and faking. You're forcing them to. It's not their fault. You're creating an environment in which people will not share mistakes for fear that it puts them on some sort of short list or just getting in trouble. They will not admit that they don't feel qualified for the jobs that they have for fear of being outcasts or again put on some sort of short list of getting in trouble, which means eventually these things will compound and eventually something will break. We've seen the results. Look what happened with United Airlines. We all saw the film of this poor paying passenger being dragged off the plane with a broken nose, broken teeth, and a concussion, right? And I feel for that crew. I do not blame the crew because they work in a culture in which they fear making the right decision. They actually fear that they will get into. They believe they will get in trouble before for making the right decision.

they actually fear getting in trouble more than doing the right thing. This was not an anomaly; this has been compounding over years. I had a personal experience on that airline years prior that was a red flag. I was attempting to board a plane, and one of the passengers - this played out in front of me - one of the passengers attempted to board the plane before their group number was called, which is, all of you know, here is a felony. And that is exactly how the gate agent treated him: Step aside, sir. I haven't called your group yet. Please step aside and wait till I call your group is how she talked to a paying customer. So I spoke up. I said, Why do you have to talk to us that way? Why can't you talk to us like we're human beings? And she looked me in the eye and said, Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job. What she revealed to me is that she does not feel safe in her own organization, and her leaders do not trust her to use her own judgment.

they do not trust her to do the job for which she's been trained to do, and guess who suffers? Customer and company. The reason we love flying Southwest Airlines is because not because they have some magical formula to hire the best people, it's because the people there feel safe in their own organization. They're entrusted to use their own judgment and do the jobs for which they've been trained to do. If you have an excess of bureaucracy in your organization, and I have worked in the university system and I feel for the people who abused me when I go get my ID because they fear getting in trouble more than using judgment, that is a cultural problem. I do not blame the person. Human beings are social animals and we respond to the environments we're in, and ultimately it is the leadership that is responsible for setting the environment. Get the end right, you get trusting teams. Get the environment wrong, you are forcing people to protect themselves from you. If you work in an organization where it is standard practice for people to feel

need to send a CYA email after every decision they make. Cover your ass. That is a sign that they feel that they have to take time and energy out of their day away from doing their jobs in order to protect themselves from you. If you work in an organization where it is standard practice for people to feel the need that they have to keep a folder of all the good things they've ever done just in case they need it, it is a sign that they feel that they have to take time and energy away from advancing the just cause in order to protect themselves from the organization. That's what you get if they feel safe. All of their energy goes to advancing the just cause. Always. The next part is a worthy rival. Now, I said before that the only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself. This is true. What your competition does is it helps reveal to you your weaknesses. Admire the others in your organization, not to beat them. There's no such thing. Not to be number one. There's no such thing. But if

somebody else is better than you at something, that means you have to go work harder yourself. It's like running in a race. If you're driven to be number one, if you're driven to make the most money, if you're driven to show up in some arbitrary ranking that you didn't even have a say in, that's like tripping the next runner. You will win the race, but you're still a slow runner. I'd rather fall behind this year and then you work and work and work because ultimately the goal is not to be number one this year. The goal is to create an organization that will outlast every single one of you. This is about building strong foundations. This is about looking long term and the short term money is simply fuel to make the car go. We don't own cars to buy more fuel. We own cars to go somewhere. It's the same thing in an organization. Your organization exists to advance something. The money is simply there to go. And I fear that what has happened in the university system is similar to what

I'm seeing in business, it's similar to what I'm seeing in politics, it's similar to what I'm seeing in hospitals, which is an over the sense of excessive pressure to bring money in at the expense of something else. There's an excessive amount of short-termism and massive amounts of rationalizing. This is just the game, we just have to do it. If we don't, somebody else will. The obsession with getting grants, meaning you're hiring people who are more likely to help you get a grant, even though they're teaching things that we don't necessarily even need or want. That's called short-termism. Unfortunately, I can't tell you the last piece because I've run out of time, but I want you to go back at least to think if being at this university is gonna be your legacy. Do you want to be known? Do we want to write on your tombstone how much money you helped raise, top fundraiser, right? Or do we want to be known for the service that you provided to the people who devoted themselves to

The Infinite Game

Discover our virtual gatherings and live events. Connect with New York Times journalists. Subscribe today, and experience live journalism from The Times.

The Infinite Game

Scripts