To commemorate the company's initial public offering in 2011, LinkedIn gave some of its employees a lucite cube emblazoned with the stock ticker, LNKD, on one side and "Next Play" on the reverse. That phrase encapsulates the business philosophy of Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO at the time.

Weiner has said he borrowed "next play" from the Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who incants the phrase to push his players past the distraction of their last success. Once Weiner adapted it as a business koan, he used next play obsessively: to announce Microsoft's $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, to describe his resignation from the CEO role, to name his new venture-capital firm. During LinkedIn job interviews, candidates were commonly asked to name the job they wanted to have after the one they were applying for—scouting out their next, next play, even before the next one became current.

Nextplayism is Silicon Valley's whole culture: What are you gonna do next? "I hear people ask it of each other two or three times a week," Ian McCarthy, a vice president of product at Yahoo, told me. Progress is based not on the virtues of results, but on reaching a milestone. What comes before is relevant only insofar as it brings about what will have followed.