Game in the Brain

In the world of commerce, there is a distinct line between a legitimate business and a scam. For many, that line is legal compliance. For me, the definition is far stricter: if you are selling something of dubious worth, or if you are indifferent to whether your product provides value to the end user, you are operating in the realm of a scam.

There is a prevalent argument in business that the seller’s only duty is to make the product available, and it is the buyer’s exclusive duty to determine its worth. While I acknowledge the buyer’s responsibility to research and compare the market, I fundamentally reject the idea that a seller is absolved of responsibility regarding the outcome.

Commerce is not a game of “gotcha.” True trade relies on a fundamental foundation of Net Benefit—a Win-Win scenario. Anything less leans towards a system of extractive organizations, or as I often view it, “slavery with more steps.”

The Seller’s Burden of Knowledge

I come from a background where the seller is required to understand the Net Benefit for the End User. This goes beyond the fine print of contract law.

Yes, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and deliverables are legal necessities; they ensure we do what we said we would do. But the ethical duty—the duty to the relationship—requires us to ask: “Does this actually help you?”

A seller has a duty to withdraw or manage the relationship if the product does not offer a Net Benefit. This requires a high degree of System Literacy. For example, a powerful automation tool might be a game-changer for a Fortune 500 company, but that same tool, with its implementation costs and complexity, could suffocate a small startup.

If a seller possesses the technological and economic literacy to understand that their product will fail at a certain scale, and they sell it to a client at that scale anyway, they have failed their duty. They have prioritized extraction over value. Too often, this failure is shielded by arguments of negligence, pushing the responsibility back onto the buyer to discover these pitfalls. But the real question is: was there false information regarding the benefit to be had? If the “value” sold was never achievable for that client, the transaction is fundamentally deceptive.

The Traffic Light Analogy: Operating in Reality

Consider the act of driving. There is the abstract concept of “right of way”—the rules that say who gets to go first. But then there is the reality of the road. When the light turns green, we technically have the right to go. Yet, as experienced drivers, we still look left and right. We check to see if anyone is going to violate our turn and dangerously impede us.

We do not make rules assuming mechanical compliance from others. We know that we are dealing with humans. We develop “fuzzy systems” to account for these human variables. We understand that people test boundaries, get distracted, and game systems.

This is a core principle of Game Theory: handling people as variables in an equation. In business, if a seller hides behind the “green light” of a contract while knowing a crash is imminent for the client, they are ignoring these critical variables. To claim “I had the right of way” after a preventable collision is a failure to account for the reality of the system we are operating in.

The View from the Top: A CEO and COO Perspective

At the C-level, we are not just selling widgets; we are deciding strategy and positioning. We possess a “bird’s eye view” of the market that our clients often lack. We have access to information that allows us to see how a product shapes the market, affects stakeholders, and interacts with the client’s ecosystem.

This privilege of information comes with a burden of responsibility.

The skill set required to make informed decisions about Net Positive value is high. As leaders, our responsibility grows in proportion to the number of people under us and the amount of information we must process. The higher the stakes, the harder the decision. Consequently, you cannot have leaders ill-equipped to take on this responsibility; such a deficit will inevitably result in collapse and the inability to steer an organization that offers such complex and hard-to-produce products and services.

We are required to:

1. Parse complex data.
2. Break down the economic reality.
3. Synthesize a solution.
4. Frame the information so it makes sense—not just to us, but to our teams, stakeholders, and customers.

When you can count your stakeholders—your employees and your clients—the impact of your product is tangible. We are required to keep track of this impact. It is my duty to know if a strategy pays off, and equally, it is my duty to know when it stops paying off so we can pivot.

Duty as a North Star

How do we maintain this standard in a reality defined by scarcity? We are constantly battling limitations on time, information, manpower, and funds.

This is where Duty acts as a North Star—a guide for operating in reality. We organize our duties in a hierarchy of needs:

1. Survival: Ensuring the immediate viability of the entity.
2. Sustaining: Maintaining operations and quality.
3. Growing: Expanding impact and value.

This system of decision-making must be communicated clearly for the sake of Transparency, Coordination, and Morale.

When a team knows that their leadership will not sell a product unless it provides a Net Benefit, it builds morale. It creates a culture where employees know they are not scammers; they are builders of value.

Beyond morale, this alignment is critical for speed and independent action. A team versed in these values, and trained in engineering and scientific disciplines, can act independently and adapt to fast-changing operational conditions. This autonomy reduces the overall bandwidth duty of the leads and management, allowing us to make better decisions and take on more ambitious improvements.

The more autonomous a team is—specifically in their ability to bring in income and revenue—the more it demands leaders who are capable of increasing the quality of life for those they are in charge of. This is not just about technical capability; it requires Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to resolve conflicts, improve cohesion, and scale these benefits.

Ultimately, this sense of DUTY is a litmus test for a leader. If they do not feel duty-bound, who are their stakeholders? And how would those stakeholders feel about someone who does not work for their best interests?

Conclusion

There is an argument to be made about the buyer’s duty, and certainly, there are buyers who act in bad faith or use products to deceive others. However, we cannot control the buyer’s intent; we can only control our own integrity.

If we claim to be experts, if we claim to offer solutions, then we must own the literacy required to know where our technology is needed and where it is not.

To sell without regard for the End User’s benefit is to abandon the social contract of trade. It is the duty of the seller to ensure that the exchange is not just a transfer of money, but a creation of value. Anything less is a failure of leadership.