Be strategic rather than opportunistic

The "long game" should be the new face of business strategy

Indian business leaders tend to be opportunistic rather than strategic, perhaps a hangover from the licence raj. Gurus exhort business leaders to view business through a long-term lens. Is business really a long game, and, anyway, what is a long game?

Professor James Carse of New York University wrote a book 25 years ago, Finite and Infinite Games, a rather arid and academic book. A more fluid book appeared last year, The Infinite Game (Simon Sinek, Penguin, 2019). Carse sta­tes, “One does not win by being powerful; one wins to become powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows is not a game at all.” As an illustration of winn­ing to become powerful, think of Nasa as America’s response to USSR’s launch of the Spu­tnik first.

Carse differentiates a finite player as being trained to anticipate every move of the competitor, to try to control the game towards a conclusion by preventing the competitor from altering the pa­st. For example, football is a finite game. Infinite players play in the expectation of being surprised and, therefore, expect the game to continue for long with no winner or loser. A good marriage, for example, is an infinite game.

I offer three examples from the non-business domain of war to illustrate perceptions of infinite games.

Factually, the Americans won most battles and lost one soldier for every six Vietnamese soldiers killed. Then why is the US commonly thought to have lost in Vietnam? It could be because of the Tet Offensive, which caught the Ame­ri­cans totally by surprise, or because of the pictures of Americans being evacuated from Saigon rooftops as the North Vietnamese forces encircled them, and later entered Saigon.

Consider the tension between China and India, brewing for over 60 years. When addressing a dispute, India is me­taphorically accustomed to playing che­ss, that is, to checkmate the opponent conclusively. China is accustomed to play xiangqi — a type of Chinese chess — where players encircle each other en­dlessly until one is ready for capture. In xiangqi, the balance of forces shifts in­crementally, giving a feeling of an endless process. In Henry Kissinger’s 2011 book, On China, the experienced diplomat refers to these two ways to play. Pe­rhaps we are currently witnessing such a game in Ladakh.

Recall how the young Ottoman, Me­hmed II, seized Constantinople on May 29, 1453, by encircling the city for 53 da­ys, cutting off supplies to the city. Constantine XI and his people faced starvation before finally succumbing. Constantinople, now Istanbul, had been besieged for centuries without success, and finally the city fell in 1453.

Vietnam, China and Ottoman illustrate the difference between their infinite game and the commonly experienced finite game.

In a TED talk, Simon Sinek offers a corporate example. On one of his visits to Microsoft, he observed that executives were obsessed with competition — analyse/criticise/decimate competition — resembling the contemporary play in Indian politics. Microsoft had gifted him a Zune HD, which, according to him, was an exceptional product. Soon after, he visited Apple and mentioned to some managers what an exceptional product Zune HD was. Apple executives tho­ughtfully re­sponded, “Really? I reckon we have work to do.” He suggests that Microsoft was in a mindset of playing a finite game, while Apple was playing an infinite game.

Hindustan Unilever launched a cre­am in 1975 to make Indians fair and lo­vely. The branding and product delivery were both exceptional. Deploying the Simon Sinek jargon, the company en­tered the five-step virtuous circle — (i) work for a cause, (ii) build trusting te­ams, (iii) study worthy rivals, (iv) re­tain existential flexibility and (v) display courage. The company built a Rs 4,000-crore skincare brand by extending the produ­ct over the next 45 years not only within India, but also in South Asia, Arab re­gi­ons, Malaysia and other markets. 
 

How­ever, the company’s cause had to cha­nge because the world cha­nged. Over time, the brand proposition became so­cially controversial because eulogising fairness as a beauty attribute became passé. Existential flexibility and courage to change were demanded. The compa­ny responded vigorously. Time will tell whether the company will succeed, but one thing is for sure: The company is playing an infinite game.

Wise business leaders should reflect on how to play the infinite game.  

The writer is an author and corporate advisor. He is a distinguished professor of IIT Kharagpur. He was a director of Tata Sons and a vice-chairman of Hindustan Unilever
 

Email: rgopal@themindworks.me