I no longer have the free time for AAA video games, being an entrepreneur, but that doesn’t mean I am ready to give up gaming altogether. In a search for something to play in my five minutes of free time I came across a digital gem called “Plague Inc” on PS4. The gist of the game is that you play as a strain of sickness (Virus, bacteria, zombie etc.) and you need to spread it to every person on earth to wipe them out! It was a unique premise and takes like five minutes to play a run through, perfect.
In my brief experience the game play goes like this: You pick a place to start that’s heavily populated like china and then pick how you want to spread your sickness via air, water, animals, etc. Once you start spreading every country catches on slowly and has one of two reactions. Most countries start working on a cure! You see the progress of finding a solution in the corner of the screen slowly add up as you continue to spread to everyone you can touch! The other reaction is from Greenland, they shut down their borders completely and stop anyone from coming in or out.
With this in mind my goal of destroying the world always ends the same way. I spread my sickness to every place on Earth except for Greenland and I lose because of them! Everything I tried to do to break into there was ineffective because they just wouldn’t let us in. Every other country in the world slowly but surely got caught up in finding a cure and died off! Despite my diabolical aptitude for spreading the plague, Greenland stood strong about five matches back to back void of any red dots (Sick people.) Finally I decided to start in Greenland and expand from there and then BOOM, my first victory! Every place on earth fell to my custom bacteria lovingly coined “Akinsonitis.”

Plague Inc.
It was at this point, looking back at my first win, I put the pieces together and learned a valuable lesson to apply to the culture in my business. There are two reactions we can have in our business to the sicknesses, cancers, and dramas. We can waste time and emotion and resources trying to fix every little problem that someone has which will ultimately lead to loss of time, money and energy. Or we decide that we will not entertain the distractions and the drama and focus solely and obsessively on what makes our business profitable and grow! This gave birth to my new mantra, “Be like Greenland!”
With this new mantra in mind it left me with one glaring weakness that could still bring down my empire. If the sickness starts with me! If I am the cause of negativity or drama in my own space than closing off my borders isn’t helpful at all! The culture has to start from the top with me and be consistent all the way down! The sickness from the outside will eventually die off, so there’s no need for me to complain about or bother with it. Do the right thing and focus entirely on the aspects that grow your business, essentially having a “zero drama” policy. Be like Greenland.
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Steve Bussa is Campaign Manager at GraySquare. To contact him, he is available on the following platforms:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevebussags/
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Email: steve@gograysquare.com