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CHAPTER 1
The Big Lie
I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.2
āPietro Aretino, Italian Author, Playwright, Poet, and Satirist
Right now, billions of people throughout the world are playing The Business Game and doing their best to win. Some play as employees, some as owners, and others at various levels in between. Every month, thousands of newbie entrepreneurs start their own small businessesāon and off the Internetāwith dreams of success, abundance, and freedom flowing from their efforts. The odds are that youāre one of those people.
As the players begin playing The Business Game, theyāre taught the official rules and regulations and do their best to follow them (more about this in a minute). Theyāre then guided to huge storehouses of advice, inside and outside of colleges and universities, within what I call āThe Five Power Centers of Businessāāsales, marketing, management, leadership, and financeādesigned to help them succeed. Armed with the rules, regulations, and an always-expanding supply of theories, tools, techniques, and strategies, the players set off like warriors on the road to success and victory. The odds are that this describes you, too, either now or years ago when you first started playing The Business Game.
Yet despite the best of intentions, following the best of the best advice and investing tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money, every single player will ultimately fail to win The Business Game. Regardless of whether youāre aware of it consciously, whether you want to admit it, or whether youāve reached that place in playing The Business Game yet, this applies to you, tooāas youāll soon see.
What do I mean by āfail to win The Business Gameā? Hereās a quick summary of the seven most common failure scenarios:
1. As owners, they fail in the traditional business sense, meaning closing their doors and going out of business.
2. As owners, they keep their doors open, but despite huge investments of time, energy, and effort, they experience tremendous struggle and stress and are barely able to squeeze out a decent living from the business, thus experiencing severe limits and restrictions.
3. As owners, they succeed in the traditional business sense, in a small, big, or huge way, meaning creating a profitable business, making a good living, building wealth, and having a comfortable or even opulent lifestyle, but paying a huge Visible Price for their success in the form of unhappiness, stress, anxiety, pain, disillusionment, health issues, relationship issues, lack of free time, and so on.
4. As employees, theyāre limited, restricted, and frustrated by job conditions controlled by others and never feel properly rewarded for their efforts or contributions to the company.
5. As employees, they give generously of their time, energy, and effort, perhaps over years or decades, only to be fired or demoted when new management steps in, downsized during tough times, passed over for promotions by people they feel are less qualified, and so on.
6. Both owners and employees may be compelled by internal or external forces to invest huge amounts of time doing things they donāt like to do, tasks that arenāt fun for them, activities that may even be painful, and so on.
7. As owners and employees, theyāll work their butts off and create one degree of success or another, only to find it wiped out or compromised by fluctuations in the economy or stock market, shifts in industry trends, new technological innovations, a bold new assault from a competitor, and so on.
On and on it goes, with variations on the same basic themes of āItāll be different for meā or āItāll be different this timeā being the familiar battle cry as such patterns repeat themselves endlessly through time. (I have tons of intimate experience with this myself).
Finally, as weāll be discussing in the chapters that follow, even if a player of The Business Game escapes one or more of the scenarios just listed, he or she will still pay a huge Invisible Price for playing it the old way.
Iām fond of using the metaphor of dog racing to describe the dynamics involved in playing The Business Game the old way. In each race, the dogs try as hard as they can to catch a mechanical rabbit, but they never catch it. Itās always just out of reach. Why donāt the dogs ever catch the rabbit at the track? Because the sport was designed, intentionally, so the dogs would forever be motivated to chase the rabbit but never actually catch it.
To continue the metaphor, the dogs may train hard, have the best diets in the world, get stronger and stronger, become faster and faster, win many races, earn lots of money for their owners (and for the people who place bets), live in fancier kennels, and wear fancier outfits on the track, but the bottom line is the dogs are still on the track and theyāre still racing to catch rabbits theyāll never catch.
While it may shock and disturb you, and you may find it hard to acceptāat firstāthe same thing is true for players of The Business Game. As we grow up, weāre taught the rules and regulations for playing The Business Game. Weāre told we can win The Business Game. Weāre told about the many rabbits we can catch if we win. So, we get on the track and start chasing our rabbits, metaphorically, and once we do that, just like the dogs, we end up stuck on the track, going around and around in endless circles, running, running, running, but never catching our rabbitsāno matter how fast, strong, rich, skilled, or powerful we get.
We get stuck in that endless chasing-but-not-catching-the-rabbit loop because The Business Game was designed with that specific outcome in mindāfor reasons Iāll be showing you in the pages that follow. Thatās a bold claim, I know, but itās a claim Iām prepared to fully document and validate.
Now Iād like to go into more detail about the rules and regulations you were given for playing The Business Game and the beliefs that naturally flowed out from them into your conscious awareness. I call that entire package āThe Big Lie.ā
First, letās chat about games. If youāre like most of the people I speak with, you may not currently look at business as a game. When I speak with people and ask them about it, many say something like this to me: āBusiness is definitely not a game. Itās a serious endeavor, and the stakes are very high.ā
The first step in The Busting Loose Process is to really understand that everything within the business dynamicāsales, marketing, leadership, management, information technology (IT), human resources, expenses, invoices, accounts receivable, accounts payable, profits, competition, the economy, the stock market, and so onāis part of an amazing, elaborate, gigantic, unique, and complex game that was created with specific goals in mind. Some of The Truth of this you already get, but additional layers and insights will be added in the next chapter.
If you take a close look, most games have rules, regulations, and a clear structure. Everyone who chooses to play a game agrees to follow the rules and regulations and observe that gameās structure. This is required to make the game work.
For example, American football is played with a leather ball thatās shaped, sized, and constructed to meet rigid specifications. The playing field is 100 yards long. You play four quarters lasting 15 minutes each. A touchdown is worth six points, kicking the ball through the goalposts after a touchdown is worth one point, a field goal is worth three points, and a safety is worth two points. A first down is 10 yards. You may only have a certain number of players on the field at any given time, and they must each play a specific position. There are rules about what players can and cannot do on the field, and if those rules are broken, the offending team is penalized. The team with the most points at the end of the four quarters (or overtime if the score is tied at the end of regulation time) wins the game.
Baseball is another example. It is played on a field that is a certain shape and size thatās called a diamond. Only nine players per team are allowed on the diamond during play, and, like football, each player has a specific position. The game is played with bats, balls, and gloves that meet precise specifications. There are nine innings during which each team is allowed three outs. Batters get four balls or three strikes. The pitcher stands on an elevated mound that is a specific distance from home plate where the batter stands. The bases are specific distances from each other. When a player touches home plate after touching each of the other bases, he scores a run worth one point. The team with the most runs at the end of nine innings (or extra innings if the teams are tied) wins the game.
Golf is our final example. The golfer plays on a course. There are a certain number of holes, greens, and fairways on the course, along with (typically) roughs, sand traps, and water hazards. The player uses clubs with L-shaped metal ends to hit precisely constructed balls into small holes. There are specific rules as to what players can and cannot do while playing, and if the rules are broken, the player is penalized. The player with the lowest number of strokes at the end of the round wins.
If you take a close and objective look at football, baseball, and golf, you see that the rules, regulations, and structures appear completely arbitrary and donāt make much sense. Consider this:
ā¢ Football. Throw a piece of leather filled with air from one person to another or run while holding a piece of leather filled with air as you try to cross a white line and score points. Or try to kick the piece of leather filled with air through two metal posts to score points.
ā¢ Baseball. Use a wooden stick to try to hit a round piece of leather-wrapped rubber thatās coming at you at high speed. Then, if you hit it and no other player catches it with a big piece of leather wrapped around his or her hand, you run around trying to touch three square pieces of cloth placed on the ground before touching a final piece of rubber to earn a run.
ā¢ Golf. Try to hit a small spherical piece of plastic-wrapped rubber with an L-shaped piece of metal to get the spherical piece into a tiny, shallow hole hundreds of yards away with the fewest possible hits or strokes.
You see what appears to be the same sort of arbitrariness if you look at the rules, regulations, and structures of other popular gamesābridge, Monopoly, pool, chess, checkers, blackjack, and so on.
You could easily ask yourself, āHow did anyone ever think up such weird games with such odd rules, regulations, and structures?ā In fact, if aliens visiting from another planet were to watch our games purely objectively, without any education about them, they might think we were all crazy for playing them! Although the rules, regulations, and structures appear arbitrary on initial examination, hidden from view are the intelligence, plan, and intent used to create themāand the joy that comes from the playing.
Players rarely question the origins of the games they play, or the arbitrary nature of the rules, regulations, and structures. They begin playing games that were invented long ago, and do exactly what theyāre told by the powers that be.
The same is true of The Business Game. When examined closely and objectively, the rules, regulations, and structure of The Business Game appear arbitrary and donāt make much sense either, as youāll soon see. However, in later chapters in this book, youāll see thereās an intelligence, plan, and intent behind the design of The Business Game, too, and as I said, when you find out what it is, itāll rock your world. It will also open the door to busting loose from The Business Game.
As we pass a certain age growing up, we become players in a Business Game that was set into motion long ago. Like athletes and other game players, we never question what weāre taught about playing The Business Game. We just accept the rules, regulations, and structure weāre taught and play as if it were all etched in stone and nonnegotiable.
Here are five of the primary rules weāve been taught are real and etched in stone for playing The Business Game. There are actually dozens of other rules, but the following are the ones weāre most familiar with and the ones that do the most damage, as youāll soon see:
1. You have a limited supply of money to play with (capital).
2. You have income (money flowing in).
3. You have expenses (money flowing out).
4. Your income must exceed your expenses (resulting in profits) or you lose the game.
5. You must maximize, grow, and sustain profits to win.
These rules seem obvious, donāt they? Thereās not much to challenge or disagree with, right?
Wrong, as youāll soon see!
There are numerous rules, regulations, and so-called magic formulas for success beneath the five basic rules in terms of how youāre supposed to manage capital, generate income, reduce expenses, and grow profits. And there are boatloads of strategies for:
ā¢ Increasing sales.
ā¢ Improving marketing.
ā¢ Managing cash flow.
ā¢ Hiring, firing, motivating, and compensating employees.
ā¢ Minimizing employee turnover.
ā¢ Increasing employee morale, productivity, and efficiency.
ā¢ Effective time management.
In support of The Big Lie driving The Business Game, here are just a few common beliefs that have also been accepted as True:
ā¢ The tax authority is your enemy (to one degree or another).
ā¢ Your competition is your enemy (to one degree or another).
ā¢ Youāre vulnerable to the state of the international economy (boom times, recessions, and depressions).
ā¢ Youāre vulnerable to movements within the international stock and financial markets.
ā¢ Your freedom to make decisions and act is limited by bosses, stockholders, partners, board members, and investors.
ā¢ Youāre always vulnerable to new products, services, and technologies that can hurt your business (or job) or even make it obsolete in the blink of an eye.
ā¢ āKeep your friends close and your enemies closer.āāSun-tzu, The Art of War
All of these beliefs are what I call āpower outside beliefsāāthe significance of which youāll soon understand. Like the five basic rules, they all seem to be True and an accurate description of the way it is. Iām here to tell you, however, that none of the rules, regulations, or beliefs I just shared, and the many subset rules, regulations, and beliefs that flow from them, are True. Not one. Theyāre all completely made up, as are the rules of all games. You just accepted them as True and accurate on blind faith. You now have the opportunity to change that. You now have the opportunity to bust loose from the old Business Game and begin playing a New Business Game.
Here are two important points I want to repeat and then discuss in greater detail:
1. You canāt win The Business Game.
2. The Business Game was specifically designed to create utter and total failure.
You canāt win The Business Game because:
ā¢ Thereās no clear definition of winning. How do you know if youāve won The Business Game? Did you ever ask yourself that question? Do you win when your business turns profitable? When you surpass a specific sales or profit goal you set for yourself? When you cash out through selling some or all of the business or go public? From my experience, while many people have financial goals theyāve set for themselves, few people have clear definitions of what winning The Business Game actually means. They just play with some sort of vague āIām winning if Iām...
