TABLE OF CONTENTS Now I can see more clearly that
the game I am playing has no special or numerical boundaries.
The outcome is less related to whether the change idea is accepted,
as though I am participating in a game that can be won or lost.
The game is much broader and more open-ended.
Now winning is insufficient as it is irrelevant.
Instead, the game entails continuing to play evolve and grow,Recounted by Stephen Denning in The Springboard and
based upon Carse's Finite and Infinite Games.
The challenge sounded fine in theory; but how might it operate in real life?
It was 1983. A $13.2B Fortune 50 company with 120,000 employees had asked us to scout, finance, and transfer worldwide knowledge into the organization to yield new products and services in the marketplace in advance of the competition. We accomplished this through the Office of Sponsored Research, which funded 240 projects in 100 worldwide universities. We managed liaison relationships with over 50 research consortia, ranging from a $10,000 research center affiliation to the multimillion dollar investment in the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas. The business agenda was one of organizational learning, not technology development. The skills required for success were based on relationships, partnering. and strategic conversations. We called it "Virtual Research & Development," our global network of expertise.
Even then, we realized that the...
