Curt Schilling, Founder & Chairman, 38 Studios/ Pitcher, Boston Red Sox
Disclaimer: I totally geeked out when I learned that Curt Schilling would be speaking at this year’s IGDA Leadership Forum. I’m a long time Boston Red Sox fan, WoW player and Instance podcast listener, but aside from that I also admire Curt’s approach to gaming and game development. So this was a real treat. :)
Curt Schilling realized he was in a different industry for sure when he entered the Marriott ballroom and a kind and courteous IGDA volunteer handed him a blue speaker evaluation form, asking that he rate the talk and the effectiveness of, well, himself. “I can do it now if you want…”
When Curt first opened Green Monster games, now 38 Studios, he was sure the video game industry and consumers were going to love the company because he’s a gamer. He was going to go out and get R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane and naturally “bowl the industry over.” But 15-20 minutes after their press release hit the wire, Curt found two bulletin posts on the brutal truth box we know as the Internet. First post reads: “R.A. Salvatore, isn’t that the “M-Fer” that killed Chewbacca?” Ouch. Second post: “Is this the Hindenburg all over again?” It quickly became clear to Curt that this whole business of making games wasn’t going to be exactly what he thought it might.
What Curt did know was that as a pro-athlete and team player for over 20 years, he was going to bring a different perspective to the role of leadership in game development.
Baseball analogies abound, but in the spirit of pulling out juicy kernels of leadership knowledge, I’ll summarize that according to Curt the difference between a baseball team and a team of game developers is… fashion. You have your superstars, your solid players, and your “asshats” (Curt’s word, heh), but at the end of the day it comes down to the people and the passion they bring to their collective effort.
What follows are my notes from the talk, hopefully relevant and readable. Enjoy!
MVP Leadership:
- Intent is not to be better than everyone else, not diminishing the challenge, but understanding it is a serious challenge.
- We start out with a lot of myths. Far from reality – Curt had a dislocated tendon, showed gnarly photo of his ankle 4-5 hours before the game. It bled during the game, and a lot of people in the media made it out to be that that was the reason we won. The reality was that Curt was a member of a team of 25 guys who had immeasurable talent and passion for the game, and the leader they had to motivate them.
- Success is about the makeup of the leader. Leadership is 1% talent, and 99% about managing great people who make up great teams. To truly accomplish anything of substance as a leader you must get your people, your family to CARE WHAT YOU THINK!
- A lot of testosterone in baseball, you shower with guys and become close. (Giggle.) But you get to know people intimately and you spend more time with your teammates than your family. This is true in games, too. Without the showering, I suppose.
- You want passion above anything else, because within passion lies all of the things you want in your customers and your employees. So how do you make people care? The core piece to being a good leader is making people care about everything. Passion is the most influential and valuable currency in business and in any leader.
- Band of Brothers, in the interviews before each episode he would listen to them talk, and the common theme in addition to bravery and valor was that Dick Winters was a man every one of them would have died for. Major Winters absolutely understood people, and life and death relied on maximizing results from people.
- “I know speaking from experience, I played for guys I didn’t care much for. And they didn’t get less effort from me, but there was different feeling at the end of the day. People act and react differently when you are invested in them.”
- This industry creates an immense amount of passion. Love and hate. Short of passion you can accept many things, almost anything really except APATHY. Slide shows Fitz Cartoon: “I was trying to figure out which is worse, ignorance or apathy… then I realized I don’t know and I don’t care.” People making the products are every bit as passionate about it as the people buying the games. But it starts at the top. You have to find the touch points in your employees.
- The sheer volume of entertainment product is staggering. We’re not competing for dollars anymore, we’re competing for hours and minutes. “There’s a piece here from a leadership standpoint that is important to me. It is without a doubt the thing I see the least amount of, but is one of the most important pieces… Apathy is Kryptonite to Superman, Venom to Spiderman, and the Red Sox to the Yankees.”
- Apathy is our mortal enemy. Apathy is a sure sign someone’s chiseling you, your product’s, or worst of all your company’s tombstone.
Customer apathy = product death
Employee apathy = your death, under achieving payroll burdens
Either can = your company’s death
- How do you make people care?
Above all else, being genuine and being honest. We are a society BUILT to look for the “but” and “if” in a situation. Care. Concern for your people, their families, their lives. Attention on THEM and to THEM. Respect for their needs/ worries.
- Micro managing is a killer for any company. Top of the food chain shouldn’t be micro managing down to the bottom. Trust the people you hire, give them the space they need to perform, and trust that they will. Accountability piece that you want to instill in the people that manage your company. “I can’t stand people that make excuses. It is something that absolutely drives me crazy.”
- There is a self honesty piece that comes into play and you need to honestly evaluate who and what you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are and make sure people understand that it’s okay to make mistakes and not be the smartest person in the room. You want to avoid being the “Last Supper boss”. Avoid being the last to know that you are inept.
- Leadership is making sure people know you trust them, they can act on initiative since everyone is acting in the best interest of the company, and they aren’t afraid to make mistakes. At their old job making mistakes = getting fired…
- “Curt Schilling used to be the best game designer in the world, but now… he has crazy ideas that cost too much money and man hours”, but he has a team of people that he can trust to set him straight when he’s out of line. Every day is education. Don’t have a problem being the dumbest guy in the room. Listen to people and what they know and what they do and give them the respect and recognition they deserve. Exchange of ideas, getting people to buy into your vision and your passion is something you have to work on every single day.
- “I’m passionate about this company and these people and what we do as a team, as a family. That passion piece will not be there if you have a group of people working from a position of fear, of mistakes or failure.”
- Analogy – “early in 1993, struggling after being in first place for the most of the year and we talked about playing from the mindset of being afraid to fail, worrying about what it was going to be like if I didn’t do well. The fear of failure was a powerful thing for me, and finding out how people were going to act and react to that is an incredibly powerful tool.”
- People operate from the standpoint of, I make a mistake, I don’t hit a milestone, we lose our jobs. As a leader, you need to instill a mental process for people to understand what making mistakes mean.
- Mistakes – every single mistake made is a good one. Except: Mistakes due to stupidity/ ignorance – your fault for putting your employees in a position to fail. And mistakes due to malicious intent, their fault for being bad people.
- Heard the term “egregious error”, went to Webster and found out that meant “really big deal”. Process mistakes correctly and make sure they never happen again. Mistakes are nothing more than a lesson, an opportunity to learn.
- It’s hard in this world, especially now, to make people believe they are more important than the product. Your people, your teams, your leaders, they are the product at the end of the day. Don’t they have to be more important? And if you’re not conveying that to them, you’re fighting a losing battle. There are ways to operate to make them understand that.
- If you fire people for reasons other than performance, good luck. Performance should be the primary motivator.
- Two of the key reasons so many people make mistakes are: 1 – Paralysis by analysis (data overload to the point of inactivity) – You get so much information about a task, you can’t perform. Just let me do what I do – like getting 9 different ways to throw the ball. 2 - Fear of failure. These reasons go by the wayside with FOCUS and TRUST.
- Only possible way to fail something is to quit. Everything else is a loss. People should trust that those daily losses aren’t going to cost them their job or get them an ass-chewing. Helping them understand that when one of these two things come into play, the answer if to focus more granularly on the task.
- In the business world: Asshats = bad eggs. The asshats who suck don’t get fired, they get relocated to another team to keep sucking. What if I’m on that new team and I have to deal with the asshat? Asshats are “the Suck”. The best teams will fail, miss milestones and deadlines, make subpar work, when they have an asshat. No matter where you put them, no matter how you put them.
- You cannot avoid hiring bad eggs. – Reality. You cannot avoid having bad eggs. – Myth.
- “At some point I’ve got to hand off that whole process” and trust that the leaders of my company are acting in my best interests. Have created an environment where if the company and the team members aren’t your priority, then you are not going to fit. If your focus is your paycheck every two weeks, then you won’t be around long.
- You want people to think they are the best at what they’re doing. Comes from accomplishment and achievement. Self evaluation, being honest with yourself. Great to think you’re the best coder on the planet, but if your code is breaking the game over and over, you might need to be honest with yourself.
- Criticism. Have always been comfortable with hearing criticism. “Hard for me not to know I suck because it’s on ESPN all day. But I’m finding it very challenging to explain to people the difference between positive and negative criticism.” Criticism is built around helping them become who they want to be. A big deal to have that skill set.
- Traits not necessary to be a great leader – muscles, money, volume, IQ. Most important skill a leader can have, evaluate your talent.
- Draft and develop = Cheapest investment, longest return and the result is an employee who “gets you”.
- Spend in the market = quickest return maybe, far shorter timeline, and the result is an employee who you have to “make fit”. They have to, because you’re paying them. This industry is notoriously the latter.
- Have to identify strengths and weaknesses and put them in the best possible position to succeed. It’s an incredibly challenging thing. How do you get better at it? Comes down to investing in people, and investing in people for Curt was telling every person he’s hired, “You’ll never work for someone that care more about you than I do.” This is the core of 38 Studios and Curt Schilling.
- The “List”:
Passion
1a) Integrity
1b) Accountability
1c) Communication
1d) Care/ Concern
1e) Honesty with yourself
1f) Trust
- You have to care more about them than anyone they’ve ever worked for every single minute of every single day of every single week of every single year.
- Level 5 leader, best greatest guy on the planet who can do anything. Biggest reason they can’t, their affect on people. People react differently to me. As cool as it is, it’s a handicap. It stops people from being their talkative, imaginative selves. “Accepting that and understanding that redefined to me what I bring to the table. I wasn’t going to draw, code or write a story, but I could lead.”
- Is, has and always been about people. If you do not care more about your people than someone else they’ve worked for, you have an ex-employee. At 38 Studios, “if they leave and go somewhere else, it’s going to be for reasons outside of our space.”
- You build empires with passionate people that care about each other. Anything else is just a place to draw a paycheck…
