David Edery on Company Culture - 5 different culture types for game companies

[Adam Martin]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=26108

(although I noted that these 5 types fail to cover a lot of companies
- this should be "5 sub-types of a particular kind of company". For
instance, none of them cover customer-relationships)

[Eskil Steenberg]

Hi again!

> (although I noted that these 5 types fail to cover a lot of companies
> - this should be "5 sub-types of a particular kind of company". For
> instance, none of them cover customer-relationships)

I would guess that if/when I start hiring people, it would inevitably
turn out to be a star company. Me being the star that is. This is
something that I have been a bit worried about. I think the best
leadership is the one built on meritocracy, but if you have a company
where one person has too much merit, its easy to have that person
outshine everyone else, and that's not a good way to get the best out
of people. A good company is a company where everybody is a star, but
in their own way, not trying to emulate someone else.

I have built EVERYTHING in Love, so the assumption would be that I
know best, but getting someone else to argue with me, and put up a
fight might just be what i need, for that very reason. But it would be
hard for any reasonable person to come in and argue they know better
then me, even if they do.

I remember Brian hook said that when working with Carmack, he couldn't
do what he wanted because he felt it would be like "bitching to
Michael Jordan for not passing the ball"

E

[Adam Martin]

At the start, Jagex was like that - Andrew wrote *everything*, and
there were few java coders around who knew as much as be about
performant server coding.

And those few had never heard of this tiny company that did no PR and
no marketing.

Not being able to trust anyone else, he eventually wrote a proprietary
scripting language, and then finally hired coders and scritpers,
allowing them to work within that sandbox.

I always felt that was a neat solution to the star problem

(also cf Mythical Man Month, which 30 years ago talked about "Surgical
Teams", pretty much the same thing, with a single ultra expert
(surgeon) and many "support" staff)

Although ... I don't think star companies are necessary. There are
much better ways to run things IMHO. Which is why I have nothign to do
with Jagex :).


--
Weird typos? Sorry, this mail was written on an iPhone :)

On 28 Nov 2009, at 21:04, Eskil Steenberg <eskil.s...@gmail.com>
wrote:

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