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Every team needs to play two kinds of games. There’s a short game and the long game. In the short game, it’s about survival. It’s about getting a product out. It’s getting to your goals at the least amount of time, at the least amount of cost possible.
And then there’s the long game. It’s the, you know, what happens if we do incredibly well? How do we build, you know, a longer-term legacy? You’re thinking about the team, the people, the culture. And you need to be able to win both games.
When these innovation teams, these really intense environments, you know, get really fixated on the immediate-term goals that they lose sight of that long game. It’s easier for innovators to really think about how long-term issues can be solved later on. The way that shows up in the way we run our organizations is we will tend to really, like, focus a lot of our attention and time and effort on things that are pressing today and will then delay and, you know, and devalue things that have benefits in the future. The reality is that a lot of the investments you make around who you hire or the kind of team culture you build, a lot of that benefits you not today but over time.
Now it’s important to distinguish between, you know, motivational error, which this is not. This is not about you saying I won’t go to the gym tomorrow because, well, I won’t see the benefits right away. This is more a computational error where you actually assume that the benefits that will come are of lesser value. So what we’re asking leaders to do is not to put aside the short game priorities, but rather make sure that you’re systematically spending some time on the long game. For instance, we know that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, very early in the life of the company, spent one day a week on making sure that they’re hiring the right people to then take the company into the future.
It’s very healthy for you to make sure you block off either half a day on a Friday or the first part of your Monday to really focus on, What are what are the goals that I have for the next five years, the next year, and then therefore the next quarter? And by having that view across those multiple time horizons, it allows you to stay focused on both the long game and the short game.