Creating the Conditions for Change (part 1)

0:00Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

0:09Actually, this is strategy. We're here to talk about my new book, my new course, a new way of thinking, a philosophy of becoming. Recorded live in my office, I did a course with video, more than three hours on Udemy. You can find the course at Seths.blog.tis, which stands for This Is Strategy. But I wanted to share some of the ideas here for you, audio only. Why a course? Well, it turns out that most people don't really want to lean into strategy. They'd rather do tactics. They'd rather do their job. They'd rather build something based on yesterday than imagine what tomorrow can bring. So what I'm trying to do in this course is help people find the foundation to talk with each other about their strategy, about the change they seek to make.

1:14And before we get to it, a quick aside, I'm inviting you to join me on an episode of Akimba. We'll record it live, a conversation about your strategy. If you've got something you're working on, something where you think me chiming in might be able to help, I hope you'll visit akimbo.link and click the appropriate button. We'll be looking at people who are raising their hand and inviting them soon. We'll record them live and turn them into an episode of Akimbo. So, without further ado, recorded live in my office, here are excerpts from the seminar on strategy. Okay, where to start? Outside Manila in the Philippines is the Mirikina Museum.

2:03In it are more than 1 ,000 pairs of Imelda Marcos's shoes. They're not in good shape. Some of them have termites. She was a dubious figure to say the least, but she did have thousands of shoes. And we begin with the question, what was it like to get up in the morning and decide what to wear when you have a thousand pairs of shoes to choose from. Because we all have a challenge like that, that we're not corn farmers who have no choice but to farm the corn. Actually, what each of us do is we make projects. And the number of degrees of freedom we have is extraordinary. There are lots of things that we can do.

2:51We can do tasks. We can do chores. we can do strategy we can connect with people we can make sales calls we can do the work we've already sold to others we can hire people we can be hired we can ask hard questions we can answer them so every day every minute of every day we have to make a decision we make projects and we make decisions and strategy strategy is a philosophy of becoming when we add up those decisions, when we figure out what the arc of our work is, then we have a chance to do the projects we're proud of to make a difference. Here's footage from not far from outside my window, a couple of miles from here, on the Hudson River.

3:35Now, the Hudson River is famously bucolic. In fact, at many angles, including this one, it looks a lot like a lake. But the Hudson River isn't a lake. It's a fjord, actually, a tidal estuary that goes both directions. It's a river. And the thing about a river is that when you look at a river in a photo, when you look at a river in a moment, it's simply water. What makes it a river and not a lake is current. Current is the motion of one particle of water toward another. It is the flow. And when we see the flow of the systems we are working in, we can come up with a better strategy. That it turns out that surf makes the surfer, not the other way around.

4:23Is this person having a good day out on the board, right? Is she having a good day on this particular run? What about this guy? What does it mean to surf well? Well, I hope we can agree that the right waves make a big difference, not so much for this person. What we're seeking to do when we talk about strategy is to begin with what is the project we are here to do, the change we seek to make, and then to go with it. Where's the current? Where's the system? How is it pushing us and in which direction? Again, thanks for joining me. Lots more to come. Keep making a ruckus. A preview of what's to come.

5:12What we're seeking is an elegant strategy, an elegant solution, a way to use the flow, the river, the current, to help us make the change we seek to make. We're going to come back to this again and again, but I wanted to highlight right from the start what we are seeking. Big problems demand small solutions. That organizations and individuals who end up making a difference don't do it by raising$400 million and then changing everything in a week. They do it by planting seeds that grow. So I'll start with the giant one, one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft. Microsoft's positioning is simple.

5:57They were the IBM of software. IBM, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. IBM, the one that was trusted by the giant corporations. IBM gave them a boost at the beginning by having them build the operating system for the IBM PC. But from that small start, what they did over and over again relentlessly is as the computer revolution grew, as companies started to use personal computers, as the system moved forward, Microsoft was there. They didn't have to be first. They didn't have to be best, best if that meant the cutting edge. But what Microsoft has done with single-minded focus is ingrained itself in a system that flows forward.

6:45In a much smaller and perhaps a little, I don't know, creepier way is Justin Kobielka's work. Justin, about 20 years ago, saw that there was a growing hobby around collecting and breeding ball pythons. This is a ball python. And they're about this big. This one, or ones like it, sell for$50 ,000 to$75 ,000. What Justin decided to do was invest and invest, not just in his facility, but in the breeding lines, holding back pythons when he knew that he could use that python to breed the next generation after generation after generation. He understood that the internet was going to transform the way people interacted around this hobby.

7:40And by positioning himself as the go-to, as the goal standard in something that was going to grow, this elegant strategy propelled itself forward. Back closer to your keyboard, Esther Dyson years ago planted the seeds for what became today's consumer internet. I met Esther for the first time in 1985. She had a newsletter called Release 2.0. It was blue on eight sheets of paper stapled together, and it cost$3 ,000 a year to get Esther's newsletter. Not many people got it. 2 ,500. But 2 ,500 times 3 ,000, you can do the math. She had a business narrating for investors, venture capitalists, and CEOs what was going to come next in the revolution of the internet.

8:35She had a conference once a year. The only way to get a ticket to the conference was to be a subscriber to the newsletter. If you wanted to get funded, If you wanted to have an impact, you needed to get in line to meet Esther. She was in the center of the back and forth of the conversation. As the river flowed, as the system changed, she was narrating the change. Last one, another big company, Airbnb was failing. It was failing so bad they made cereal. Obama owes and McCain, I don't remember what those are called, boxes of cereal to fund the real project, which was Airbnb. And it was failing because if you try to say to 300 million people in the United States, please don't stay in a hotel.

9:23Try to understand what Airbnb is. It's not going to work and it's not going to spread. And in a last ditch effort, they went to South by Southwest, a tech conference in Austin, Texas. Lots of people go for just a few days. The people who go to South by, those people had Twitter accounts. Those people were influencers in a very small circle. So here you were with thousands of people showing up in a place where there weren't enough hotel rooms. It wasn't hundreds of thousands of people. It wasn't millions of people. It was thousands of people. And what they were able to do is create the conditions for that small group of people to have a terrific experience with Airbnb.

10:10And what did they do after that? They talked about it. Now, there's no way from these examples that you can say, oh, I get it. I understand what strategy is. But I wanted to highlight for you that we're going to do some deep thinking together about what the system is like, what the games are like, what the tactics need to be to support our attempt to make a ruckus, to make a change happen. For a long time, I've wondered why is it so much easier for me to see strategy than other people? Why is it that we so often, including me, get personally hung up on the work we're doing and how hard it is to change?

10:54I realized that both of those things are related to something that I stumbled onto when I was 10 or 15 years old, which is that I'm a game designer. I designed my first computer game in 1976, and I became a professional game designer right after business school. I have built games on and off for years. And so we're here with a fairly long lesson to get us started about the idea that we're looking for games. And I need to help you see, if you're not a game designer, what a game designer sees. Because Monopoly and Scrabble, those are board games. Monopoly is a terrible game. Scrabble is a pretty good one.

11:32but everywhere around us there are games and we're going to begin this rant by trying to understand what makes something a game and then i'm going to share with you a dozen and a half rules that help you think about what games are and how we can look at what's right in front of us our choices the many many pairs of shoes that we can put on and realize that what we're actually doing is engaging in some sort of game. We don't have to take it that seriously, though it is important. And we can find the flexibility to change our strategy, to change our approach, without thinking that that was a failure.

12:17We have the power to bring a new strategy to the work we're doing. What makes it a game? I'm going to pick five things. There are competitors. There are rules. there are feedback loops, there is scarcity, and there are outcomes. Now, some games are finite games, and some games are infinite games, and they're not the same. James Kars wrote the first book on this. Simon Sinek, my friend, wrote a new one. Finite games are games that have a prescribed ending. Soccer is a finite game. At the end of time, the game is over. Infinite games are games we play to play. So if we're playing catch with a three-year-old, we don't try to win catch.

13:03We enjoy the fact that we are playing it. But there are other games. The fact that the world did not blow up in a nuclear explosion in the 60s and the 70s is partly due to the work on game theory that Rand and others did to understand the mindset of things like mutually assured destruction. Games can be dead serious and games can be silly, but they're still games because they have in common these elements, right? These elements of scarcity, feedback, rules, competitors, and outcomes. And so when you think about your career, about the work you're doing, about your project, I hope you can see at some level you are playing a game.

13:45So I promised you 18 principles. The first one is this. You don't have to enjoy the game for it to actually be a game. Family dynamics can be a game. Getting a table at a restaurant can be a game. Engaging with somebody at the car rental counter can be a game. You don't have to be enjoying yourself. But if the basic structure of a game is present, you are playing a game. Number two, you don't have to acknowledge that it's a game. It's still a game. And if you are surrounded by people who understand that there are games being played and that they can bring a different strategy to the table, it pays for you to realize you're playing a game as well.

14:28That's because we know a lot about how games work. The outcome of a game often has very little to do with how much you want to win. This is one of the myths of Little League Baseball. This is one of the myths of you didn't try hard enough. Trying hard enough, crying if you don't win, having your entire soul in it, that's not necessarily an element of what is necessary to have a good strategy to play a game well. Number four, everyone playing the game almost certainly has a different perspective than you do. And we have to develop the empathy for our fellow players to understand what their strategy might be, because they might not be looking for what we're looking for.

15:15And in fact, that is a huge opportunity. Number five, some games we're in for our whole life. And some games we can play this afternoon for an hour and a half. We should realize which games are temporary and which games benefit from having a long-term point of view. Number six, not everyone you're playing the game with is going to play by the same rules. This doesn't work when you try to play Monopoly or Scrabble, but it's interesting if you're a game board person. My friend Peter Alotka co-designed a game called Cosmic Encounter, and the conceit of Cosmic Encounter, if you can find a copy, is that every single player is playing by a different set of rules, and hilarity ensues, and it's a fun game, but it's worth just highlighting here one more time.

16:06You have adopted a set of rules. Your circle has adopted a set of rules, but not everyone is going to play by those rules. Number seven, you cannot step in the same river twice. Once a game starts to unfold, it becomes a different game because people who have come before you, there's different feedback loops, there's different assets, there's different expectations of the rules. The game keeps changing. Number eight, short-term losses. Things that we invest early on can lead to long-term wins and vice versa. And it may make sense to go get that education or go buy that machine, even though it doesn't pay for itself today, because later it will pay off.

16:56And the opposite can also be true. When we find a shortcut, but a hustle to get us a short win today. We're on the way to burning out because it's not necessarily going to help us tomorrow. On the other hand, sometimes the best way to win is to help other people succeed. And this is part of the mantra of learning and working in community. That when we show up and help the others and build alliances and figure out how to see other people, it turns out that can help us with the finite or the infinite game that we're playing. Large games are made up of small games all the way down to the smallest possible game.

17:39The way you greet the receptionist is part of the much larger game of where is your career going to go. You're not manipulating that person, but we need to understand that we are always engaging, whether it's in a dyad or a multiplayer game, in moves that inform the strategy that we are trying to bring to the table. And alas, most games are not fair. This is a lesson that we learned when we were four years old, and it's very frustrating to acknowledge, but it's true. Most games are not fair. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to check out the book, the audio book, the digital book, the collectible cards and chocolate bar, the strategy deck, or the Udemy course.

18:26All the links are at sets.blog slash T-I-S. Next week, we're picking up where we left off with the Udemy course, seven more principles. Thanks for living. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.