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Latest Commonplace post is about scrubs and maestros:

commoncog.com

Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?

Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.

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But would a Malone-clone in 2021 be playing the "real" game? Malone existed during the "cult of shareholder value", but those days are long past...

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I think there's also a short-term vs long-term argument to be had with someone like Malone. I really liked "The Good Jobs Strategy" which essentially argues that a lot of Malone like decisions are less profitable than investing in excellence even if they cost less up front.

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(I have some caveats about the book, and I don't think it's 100% true 100% of the time, but I do think it's probably true a lot more than ruthless profit-above-all-else types tend to pretend it is)

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I guess this points at one of the big differences between scrubs in games and scrubs in the real world. There's being a scrub about the game you play, but once you move outside of a narrow sport, you also have a great deal of freedom to choose what game it is you play.

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THIS. I didn’t really articulate this in my essay, but this is a key thing in any discussion about scrubbiness in business.

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For instance, say you are Elon Musk and your goal is to move humanity to electric vehicles. Your chosen lever, a car company named Tesla, goes bankrupt in the process. But you achieve your goal. Scrub? Depends on the game.

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Thinking further, I think the real lesson (that I should have written) is that scrubbiness can only really be determined by the frame of the game you pick. And so your job is to pick the game and not lie to yourself (i.e. act like a scrub) when you fail.

8:00 AM · Sep 22, 2021Twitter Web App

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Yes. But this quickly becomes murky. What if you learn that the frame you picked is wrong and want to change it. You might be a scrub for changing the frame to suit yourself. Or you might be a maestro. Unclear even with good, non-scrubby intentions.

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I'm not sure I want to claim seriously (because it would require taking Kegan stages seriously) but maybe a scrub is someone at Kegan Stage 3, "winning" is Kegan Stage 4, and picking the game is Stage 5.