Winning Long-Term Games

The key to winning long-term games is to stop playing them as a succession of separate short-term games.

Yet, most people take the opposite approach.

Here are three examples:

The manager who sees each interaction with her team as a separate game. Every time she talks to her subordinates, it's to get things done rather than develop their skills. As a result, she fails to build the long-term assets (a competent team) she needs in order to win her long-term game (a successful career). The spouse who lies as a way to avoid responsibility. If lying has, say, a 1% chance of getting discovered, it's a great short-term tactic (it succeeds 99% of the time) but a terrible long-term strategy (if you lie once a week, you have a 99.5% chance of getting caught over a decade). The solopreneur who sends weekly emails to their mailing list and sees each as a separate game. Therefore, they consume their audience's trust to generate more sales within a single email instead of building trust to create more sales within a few months.

These three examples show that approaching long-term games as a succession of separate short-term games is a bad strategy despite working great over short time horizons.

Instead, you should play short-term games not to win them but to progress your long-term objectives.

This book teaches you how to do that and much more: how to design and execute Reproducible Success Strategies, how to pre-empt failure and learn from the failures of others, etc.

Foreword by Guy Spier