>Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.

Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.