My colleague Vanessa Patrick caught my attention the other day when she wrote about James Carse’s 1986 book “Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.” The book offers a useful lens for understanding how we approach competition, growth, and purpose.

Finite games are played to win. They have clear rules, defined endpoints, and they produce winners and losers. Think: quarterly earnings calls, market share battles, and merger negotiations. Importantly, you can’t change the rules of a finite game.

Infinite games are played to keep playing. There’s no end. The purpose is the continuation and growth of the game itself. You can change the rules anytime.

Without realizing it, most organizations switch back and forth between both types of games. Your budget cycles and performance reviews operate as finite games. But your talent development, customer relationships, and innovation investments? Those are infinite games, whether you realize it or not.

Here’s the important part: executives who grasp the differences between these two very different types of games make fundamentally different choices. They still compete fiercely in finite games—closing deals, hitting targets, outmaneuvering competitors—but they anchor these activities within an infinite framework. They ask different questions: What kind of company are we becoming? How do we strengthen the conditions that allow us to keep playing? What would we need to change if we want to be here in 50 years?

I suspect that companies playing infinite games tend to weather disruption better because they’ve invested in adaptability over optimization. They build deeper customer loyalty because the relationship matters more than any single transaction. They attract better talent because everyday life doesn’t feel like “win or else”.

If you’re optimizing for this quarter’s results at the expense of the next decade’s capabilities, you might be winning finite games while losing the infinite one.

The companies that thrive over the coming decade won’t be the ones that win more finite games. They’ll be the ones who spend as much time as possible playing an infinite game.