This formulation is from Samo Burja as part of his Great Founder Theory:

Great Founder Theory - Samo Burja

A live player is a person or a tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or a group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.

Important aspects are:

• Ability to identify changing circumstances
  • As opposed to being stuck in a conventional narrative
• Ability to take meaningful action in response to the circumstances
  • As opposed to workshopping, reassuring satisfaction with status quo, deflecting blame
  • Burja talks about difference between tight coordination between exceptional individuals (live players) and ossified formal structures (dead players)

Examples of live players

• Silicon Valley VCs + companies embracing early action on coronavirus

  • Contrast: tech media mocking companies for taking this early action

• Burja: Russian state under Putin — annexation of Crimea

  • Note however that the Russian economy may be dead, running on Soviet-era fumes

• Australian Governments undertaking reform

  • Hawke + Keating economic reform
  • Howard guns ban
  • Snowy Hydro scheme

• Elon Musk — SpaceX, Tesla

• Historic examples of economic development like Singapore, Dubai

  • Contrast Dubai opportunism around creating tourism and freight hub to Abu Dhabi which remains heavily reliant on oil

• Thomas Cromwell engineering Henry’s divorce, separation of England from the Catholic Church, etc. “The morning’s circumstances are new, and there are no rules to guide us.”

  Wolf Hall trilogy

Examples of dead players

• Recent Australian governments + political parties? Minimal major reform
• Beltway-bandit contractors
• Burja argues that Apple has been a dead player since Steve Jobs passed away — "a bureaucracy imitating his taste".
• NIMBY governance in places like California
  • General zero-sum / entrenched-paradigm governance, eg binary regulation of Uber/Lyft: why hasn’t it been possible to create a new construct that combines driver flexibility with some benefits?