What’s the difference between finite and infinite thinking? Why is it Important?

The difference between finite and infinite thinking has to do with how a person looks at the future. If you’re a finite thinker, your emphasis is on winning and losing. Your thinking is short term. If you’re a long-term or infinite thinker, then you consider whether or not what you are building and working toward will last for centuries. How you think on this issue affects your decisions and shapes your life and the lives of others. Both types of thinking are important, but which one dominates makes an enormous difference. (Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game)

The views of 1980s conservative economist Milton Friedman demonstrate the differences. Friedman redefined capitalism to emphasize profit. It wasn’t to serve customers or employees, or to benefit people’s lives. Friedman felt the goal of business was to please the shareholder. Those shareholders thought in terms of quarterly profits and making as much money as possible.

These revised attitudes caused executives to focus on pumping up the value of the stock through various means: firing workers to cut costs, repurchasing stocks, and cutting corners in terms of safety to reduce overhead. Think of Boeing and its multitude of problems over plane crashes, and parts of planes falling off in flight. Boeing has suffered financially for these finite decisions.

Look around you. There are many companies that have changed their perspectives from serving their customers and clients to pocketing increasing executive salaries, stock options, and bonuses. You may work for a company or business where profit is the chief goal. Is profit wrong? Of course not. What’s wrong is that being the best in producing a product is transitory. What’s best today may be outmoded a few years later. Profit motivation makes companies short- sighted.

Are you old enough to remember Kodak? In the early 20^th century, Kodak made cheap, easy-to-use cameras for the general public. Kodak’s 19^th century founder, George Eastman, was an infinite thinker whose goal was to enrich people’s lives by providing photos of life experiences. His company was tremendously successful.

Digital cameras and then phone cameras came along in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries which were cheaper and easier to use. Eastman’s successors had changed the goal from service to profit. Kodak went bankrupt. It still exists, but making cameras for the general public is no longer what it does.

Recently, I tried to return a defective product made by an Amazon competitor. When I contacted the customer service department, I asked their customer service representative to send me a packing slip so I could return the product. She tried to negotiate a deal with me, offering me replacement parts for the product. My answer was no, just send the packing slip. The representative tried three times to change my mind before I lost patience and told her that if she continued to try to talk me out of returning the product, then I wanted to “speak with her supervisor”. I got my packing slip within just a few minutes. That company was thinking in finite terms.

That’s why Amazon now dominates retail services while other corporations have trouble competing with it. Founder Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an infinite thinker. It took years for Amazon to make its first profit.

In America today, whether it is in business or in government, selfishness and laziness trump serving the public. The problem with following Friedman’s idea of serving shareholders (read: the super wealthy) is that it supersedes caring for the average employer, retiree, or poor person. Consider the recent suspension of USAID foreign aid payments around the world.

Serving the public and making people’s lives better is an infinite goal. Making the emphasis on short-term profits for the CEO or cutting costs may work for a while, but eventually time and technological innovation will overcome short-term finite thinking.

Use the contrast between finite and infinite thinking when viewing politics, products or even parenting. If you want your kids to make you look good, you’re not going to be happy with how they turn out as adults.

Attitudes affect behavior and have consequences.

Richard Elfers is a columnist, a former Enumclaw City Council member and a Green River College professor.