Snapped a few quick photos to post here. Though, seems like more a floating around Facebook, etc.

Pre-conference drinks: Coray Seifert (Koas), Julianne Greer (The Escapost), Michael Capps (Epic), Jamie Fristrom (Torpex), Tom Buscaglia

More drinks…: Ray Gresco (Blizzard) Rodney Gibbs (Fizz Factor), Tina Kowalewski (Sony), Richard Vogel (BioWare Austin)

Room fills up to see Curt Schilling for the opening keynote.

Curt Schilling at the podium.

Group huddle during the “idea swap” session.

Studio growth case studies panel: Jason Coleman (Big Huge Games), Tim Gerritsen (2K Boston), Shawn Himmerick (Midway Newcastle), Kelly Zmak (Radical).

Folks mingling at the lobby bar.

Folks enjoying the nice sit-down dinner :)

At the open-bar “after party” sponsored by EA Partners, Green-Ear and Image Metrics.

Mike Capps (Epic) belting out some Beastie Boys to great effect.

Mark Cerny keynote action.

Team problem solving workshop…

More team problem solving workshop action…

Off course, scrum guru Clinton Keith has his group stand up for the problem solving workshop.

Closing studio heads’ “hot seat” panel: Tim Train (Big Huge Games), Tobi Saulnier (1st Playable Productions), Michael Capps (Epic), Jen MacLean (38 Studios), Brett Close (38 Studios).

Conference participant Maureen Starkey also uploaded a bunch of Leadership Forum photos to her Flickr stream.

Keynote Panel – Studio Heads on the Hotseat
Speakers:
•    Jen MacLean – Chair, IGDA Board of Directors (moderator)
•    Dr. Mike Capps – President, Epic Games
•    Brett Close – President and CEO, 38 Studios
•    Tobi Saulnier – CEO, 1st Playable Productions
•    Tim Train – Studio General Manager, Big Huge Games

They originally came up with this panel at a discussion at DICE.  They were chatting about feedback about the 1st Leadership Forum, and it would’ve been nice to get some really honest stories and info about what it’s like running studios.

Studio Culture

Tim: The culture all started with the name of the company.  The basic reason behind why a culture is important is because it’s why people do what they do for you.  In reading these accounts about history and thinking about why do people do the things that they do in military for instance, so much of it is about the culture of the group.  Culture can make someone walk into machinegun fire on a beach, so it’s fairly important on how you can get people to make video games.

Brett: It’s sort of a self-governing culture.  It’s going to be there one way or another.  It’ll happen at your company, so if you don’t engage your people about this culture and behavior, that culture will run amok.  You have to actively engage people about it and create positive feedback loops that create a great educational and self-governing culture so that people can tackle problems when you aren’t all together.

Jen: Mike, how do you keep people excited about a project during tough times?

Mike: Epic’s culture is about perfectionism.  You can do whatever you can to keep people happy, but it doesn’t really matter unless people are excited about the quality of the products and games.  Our hiring process is  entirely built around passion and finding people who care so much about what they’re doing.  Doing whatever they can do to get themselves that invested.

Jen: Your company is not about making a profit, how does that fit into your culture?

Tobi: There are 3 types of people; people who are there for the paycheck, people who are there for the career, and people who are mission focused.  In a large company, you have to deal with all of these kinds of people.  Since I’m a mission-focused person, wouldn’t it be interested to focus on one type of game.  1st Playable from day 1 is a mission-driven culture and company.  There are some large mission-driven companies like Apple; you have to very specifically make the mission clear and obvious for people.  1st Playable has about 30 people right now, and it’s hard to tell if you’re looking for a new person who’s looking to join the team.  There are a number of different characteristics that you have to assess when hiring and adding them into your team.

Getting your company up and running

Brett: How do you fund a studio in the crappiest economy in American history? In our vision, we started a little differently; we had the initial funding from our founder and some angels.  We’re building a studio, we’re building a pipeline, we’re building a product.  In this particular economic environment, it strangely plays in our favor; the growth of the games industry is outstripping the growth of the economy.  It’s actual a shelter and a strong place to put money given the current economy.  Get revenue as quickly as you can.  It’s almost like playing an RTS; you’re building up some facilities, then you get more resources as quickly as you can, and then you build up more facilities.

Jen: Mike: I’m guessing you’re not as worried given the current economic state.

Mike: Well, we’re still worried that sales might just stop.  Normally there might be 10 hits this season, and there might only be 3 hits.  We picked up a team in Warsaw that got hit by a business crunch.  Same thing with a team out in Utah; it’s interesting about how these additions have fit into our company culture and how we can learn with each other.

Jen: Tim, your company was most recently acquired. How has that been?

Tim: We’re now a public company, so there is a lot more beurocracy.  Publishers have realized that they can’t really supplant developers and just move them around.  THQ has been really great at letting Big Huge maintain their culture.  The upside now is that they can focus on just making games.  So much of what I used to do was so draining.

Mike: If I were a studio owned by THQ, I’d be really scared since they’ve been closing studios.  You weren’t scared?

Tim: Obviously it’s a hard decision for THQ, but if they had come to us and said the whole company is hurting and we need to lay off 10%.  But since they closed other studios, it makes us feel safer since they’re basically double-downing on us.

Jen: The closings had to have freaked out your staff, right?

Tim: We told the truth as we saw it and there’s definitely a little bit of “those people died so you could make great games,” but that does lend a little more weight that, “man they really believe in us.”  I don’t feel like it freaked people out.

Work life balance

Jen: What does quality of life mean to you, Mike?

Mike: What is quality of life? That’s a good question.  How quality of life comes from doing what you love to do.  And it’s not just that, but if you’re a great character artist, not only do you get to make crazy cool characters, that art will be seen by millions of people.  We aren’t about 40 hour work weeks.  We split the profits within the company.  We kick people out at 2 AM, because that has an impact on the product.  I don’t think the 9 to 5 work style works for our industry.

Brett: We’re an anti-crunch company.  A bastard that I worked for would say, “You’re doing what you love, stop complaining.”  There are times where you’re going to need to do something for your family or take vacation and we’re going to honor that.  I firmly believe that if someone gives you enough notice, he or she shouldn’t be allowed to take time off.  If you can’t provide that for them, then it’s a problem in the culture of your company.

Mike: Question for you Brett, we like teams to crunch together, there’s a community that comes out of that.  We try to get everyone in there together.  There’s an official on-crunch switch so that they can inform their families of what’s happening.

Tim: We’ve been through a few phases of crunch.  During Age of Legends, we had a “whatever it takes to get it done,” and people got burnt out completely.  We tried to fix that over time.  I kind of disagreed with Curt’s talk yesterday which is that there’s no way sometimes to avoid crunch completely.  I’m just trying this explanation on for size, but games, as an entertainment industry is like joining a rock band.  People in rock bands don’t expect to have 40 hour work weeks.

Tobi: I think there is a poor understanding of what the long-term effects of crunching are on people and their lifestyles.

Brett; We’re exactly in the same position of dialing back, this is a marathon not a sprint, and you can’t work at this pace forever.

Tobi: People want to have an impact beyond just putting in the hours; they want to make change in their work and their communities and society.

Personal leadership

Jen: I’m curious given your role of managing an internal team and working with external partners, how do you maintain credibility?

Mike: We’re lucky that we can pick and choose publishers.  We’re brutally honest and say that when we’re working with certain people, we’ll call them on things if they do things poorly or wrong.

Tim: One of the things that has come up about internal credibility, having the belief that you’re all working together is something that means a lot people.   We have a very open door policy.

Brett: We don’t have any credibility.  Until you ship, you really don’t have any credibility.  We’re dealing with that by getting people who have delivered things in the past.  Actually show that the concepts that you’re pushing are actually really cool and that the increasing credibility bar is making it more difficult.

Jen: What do you love and hate about being a studio head?

Tobi: I’m a little bit of an idealist.  What I love is that I don’t have to listen to anyone tell me that I’m not an idealist.  I spent a lot of years having people lecture me about how being an idealist made me naïve.  What I don’t like, you end up having to make a lot of decisions without a lot of support.  You end up having to make up a lot more decisions on your own, and you know your making a lot of mistakes, and there’s no one to blame except yourself.  But there’s a payoff.

Tim: Why I do what I do, is because I love geek culture.  We all grew up watching Star Wars and playing RPGs.  I just getting the biggest kick riding up an elevator with guys in suits and guys and talk about balancing the races in our games.  What I love is creating and nurturing a support structure where the geek culture can thrive.  What I hate is that I don’t get to participate in that as much, and I can’t be friends with all the cool people in the studio.  I’m not going to get invited to all the parties.

Mike: I get invited to all the parties!

Brett: What I love is hanging out with you and drinking wine!  A lot of the same sort of stuff.  The Santa Claus sort of stuff.  I will get you any tool to make you do whatever you need to do.  I will do whatever I can do to make your lives great in this industry.  What we really want to do is facilitating that fantastic work environment.  I’ve been in other industries and it’s incredibly boring.  Incredibly smart and creative people in this industry.  It’s never fun to tell someone that they don’t fit.  By definition, there are people who won’t fit, even if they want to, and it sucks.  We’re intentionally not tied to a publisher at the moment, so I have to take on the honesty-guy role of a publisher.   It’s hard sometimes having to deliver a harsh message.

Mike: I love making people happy and I hate making them unhappy.  I love giving them an environment that can make them happy.  The cool thing about being a studio head is that we influence not just the millions of our audience, but also that hundreds of other engineers will be able to use these tools.

Jen: If you had one single piece of advice to aspiring studio heads, what would it be?

Tim: The thing that trips a lot of people up, is getting stuck too much on their idealism.  It’s different from the kind of idealism that Tobi’s talking about.  It’s about load-balancing and prioritizing.  See the big picture and understand the trade offs of what you can really accomplish.

Brett: Be consistent about what you say and what you do.  Very simply, if you aren’t straight-up with your people, they very quickly get a whiff of not really being able to trust you.  You could lie once and your credibility is basically gone.  No matter what, hold that accountability piece, setting the vision, setting the goals, and following through with what you said.

Tobi: Two possible situations; one you have some experience and want to start a studio.  Have a really clear idea about why this company is needed. For people who are just thinking that this is what I’d like to do sometime, just be a really good student.  Ask lots of questions, learn from everyone around you.  At some point, you’re going to have to have the answers.

Mike: Trust your people a lot.  They rarely let you down.  People really respect you when you trust them. Don’t be afraid to do the mean, bad stuff, 99% of the time it ends up well once I stand up and face.  No matter what, the company feels better.

Question 1: It sounds like passion is something you really need in this industry?  How do you handle someone who has lost the passion?

Mike: They’re done.   I’ve never seen someone who lost passion and got it back.

Tobi: Everyone has a sweet spot, and as a manager, you can do a lot to place that level attention on them and help them in their problems.

Tim: The most important thing is to keep an open dialogue.  Maintaining that your expectations remain where they were, but listening to them and whatever their situations might be.

Brett: Just pay them more. All things being equal, people need managers, not jobs.  It’s about how they’re being engaged.  If they’re doing the work, but has no passion, switch things up.  Put another manager on them and see what happens.

Tobi: As a small company, you have to think, this person who’s struggling could be a star someone else.  You have to help them recognize that.  If you’re constantly trying to rehabilitate that person, you’re preventing them from becoming that star player in another company.  You just have to trade them.

Question 2: I read somewhere that Jack Welch recommends laying off 5% to keep the bar up.  What’s your take, Tobi?

Tobi: I’m in the games industry because I don’t want to have to lay off people.  Corporations have to do that, but I just don’t have the stomach for it.  I’m too engaged with people.  I couldn’t be a surgeon either.

Mike: It doesn’t make sense in a small company to lay off 10% since we’ve spent so much time and money hiring the right people.

Brett: I’ve worked for some very large publishers and the mandate was 20%.  I’d say 75% of that 20% were really good people and that bottom 5% deserved to go.  That culling off the bottom, there are some places where that’s healthy. If you’re incredibly picky, you’re going to get the right people.  We’ve had very few people who have left because the company is happier, the person is happier.  We have the numbers that we need and that’s the core team that we’re sticking to right now.  There’s nothing more important than who you hire and who you fire.

Studio Growth Cases

Three speakers each give a 20 minute session

Jason Coleman, Studio Technical Head for Big Huge Games

Big Huge Games has grown from 60 to 120 over last 3 years

· Start work on open world rpg

· Added a second team

A large number of new things came up over this period

Caught up with someone at a party that had worked for him and figured out that he didn’t actually realize who Jason was – the company had gotten to the point where people didn’t necessarily know everyone anymore

Historically, hiring was occasional – easy to integrate

Now hiring is more rapid so integration is more difficult and requires deliberate action

People can get lost depending on happenstance – where they’re sitting can make a big difference

Assimilating better is important

· Pay more attention to initial seating

· Actively pursue mentoring

· Codify more of the process

Documented processes and systems, kept up to date, which show pictures of key people to talk to about systems etc to make it easy on new people.

A lot of personal growth

· New roles at every level

· Entry-levels can feel insignificant

Helping people adjust

· Clearly define roles

· Give people appropriate room to grow

· Everyone can help mentor

Important to let people experiment and fail – even if it’s something that doesn’t look like it’s going to work when you analyse it.

The Second Team was setup

· Split out all over the place, in different offices and areas

· Less cool? Less important?

· Little momentum?

· Constantly raided for talent for top team

Instead, the way to set up a second team would be more like:

· Not the “b-team” culture

· Give sufficient personnel

· Collectively move to a new space

Problems on the big team

· Never enough information at the right levels

· Big disconnection from making a game

Reorganisation focused on “A more intimate big”

· RPG steering group re-organization

o Departmental representation

o Conduit for accurate information

o Can make forward progress

· Return of Daily Games – rotate everyone in the company through, get them to play the game and remind people of what we’re doing. Helps people see the big picture, stuff outside of what they’re specifically working on (etc)

Anticipating structure requirements, they implemented matrix maps and formalized the structure of the team

Departmental managers and project leadership is separated to ensure that each role is given appropriate focus which has really worked

There’s always something you can do better!

Things like company gatherings and RSS feeds help to bridge the gap between separate departments – sitting in cross-team groups or sitting in on specific team meetings to answer their questions about other areas, etc, helps.

Combat teams have been really successful with collocated cross-departmental teams

Core principals:

· Make best-in-class games

· Practice Intellectual Honesty

· Teamwork Drives Success

Shaun Himmerick, Studio Head Midway Newcastle

From Midway Chicago, been at Newcastle for last year or so.

Formerally Pitbull Syndicate ltd before acquired by Midway, now working on Wheelman

Massive growth!

Growth strategy – kept all the same systems, hired a lot of people, promoted a lot of people. Basically if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Mistakes? All of the above.

· Didn’t account for change and growth

· Weren’t prepared for more people

· Not everyone was ready for promotion – art leads who were working with teams of 5 were now art directors.

Grew so fast that people didn’t have much buy in, people weren’t aware of what the point of the game even was.

Hiring a few people here and there resulted in having a much larger team without actually planning to so there were no systems in place to cope with that. The art director, for example, was also assigned tasks on projects…

Everyone in every position should be planning for their successor – someone should be able to slot in if you leave or get promoted. This isn’t something they had originally considered

Admit something is wrong or just “not right” – easy to just let things slide if you’re not willing to make big changes

Listen to the team to make changes

The goals of “making a game” and “making a studio” are different things – knowing which you’re trying to accomplish is important

Hiring someone because “there’s nothing wrong with them” isn’t necessarily going to result in the right fit – look for someone who is going to make the studio better off by being there, even if that takes longer (it will).

One driven person could successfully lead a small team but when there’s 100, you cannot effectively lead them all yourself. You need to lead a small team of leaders who each lead their own small teams to effectively manage an entire team.

Bottlenecks destroy schedules

There will be people in the trenches that are also leading, despite not having leadership as part of their role. Get them on your side, enable them to help drive the vision – get them to run a meeting, give them training and nurture that frontline leadership.

Despite not being a scrum-guy, Shaun implements strike teams and finds them very successful.

While confidence is contagious, so is lack of confidence (Vince Lombardi quote) – very true.

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it” – T. Roosevelt

Being the smallest midget is not an achievement

Kelly Zmak, President of Radical Entertainment

Recently laid off half of their staff as a result of acquisition by Activision Blizzard – this talk is about growth that preceded that

Having a workable goal was important – leveraging tech process and leadership, scale (breadth and depth), studio planting. All of these goals needed to match the corporate objectives or there’s no point.

What we do starts at “hard” and goes up from there – temper enthusiasm with reality, this is 90% sweat and 10% talent.

What worked?

· Hired 100+ people in 12 months (50% growth, from 220 to 320)

· 10% attrition rate over that period – the staff believed in what was happening

· New Leadership opportunities

· Middle management advancement (promotions)

· New people brought new ideas with them

Must find a way to make it fun, thrilling and fulfilling to ensure engagement.

Great success in hiring from Britain – the brits loved the Vancouver / British Columbia environment.

What did not work?

· Underestimated the cost (both real cost and opportunity cost), such as relocation from the UK

· The time it takes

Some people suck at interviewing – no matter how much training you give them. Some people just don’t like talking to people, which means you tend to leverage the same small set of people to interview. People that are suddenly spending a lot of time interviewing and not much time making games.

What did they learn?

· It’s hard to learn fast

· It’s REALLY hard to grow well!

· It’s BRUTAL to grow FAST & WELL!!

· Make sure your staff knows “WHY” you’re doing it – that doesn’t mean saying why, it means checking that people get it and doing what it takes to ensure that people do get it. Don’t assume they do just because you said it. CHECK.

· What you sell MUST be what you are – there’s no “bait & switch”, don’t trick people into a role as they won’t stay

· Know what you need, understand what you want

· Let the staff make the decision as to whether they want to be a part of what you’re doing by being honest about what you’re doing

· New people with new ideas – what a pain in the ass! All these new ideas take time to consider, don’t underestimate it

· Do not underestimate the cost of a bad hire!

You can embrace, you can resist or you can ignore change it but you can’t avoid it. Everyone’s involved in it. You have to be personally invested in it and your people need to believe that you are 110% behind it.

They never hid decisions or ramifications from their staff – honesty and open communication helped people transition.

Q&A session

Retaining top talent is about making your organization the place they choose to be – their role will be the same wherever they are so what about your culture ensures yours is the company they want to work for? That’s what you need to focus on to retain your best people.

Defining your culture is the first part of protecting it. Giving people ownership of an individual area helps to protect that small-team cultural buy-in even when your team is much larger.

Preserving your culture is not hiring anyone. It’s the antithesis of change. Culture should be dynamic, adaptive and a biorhythm – it has natural highs and lows, you don’t want it snapping between them but to have them is fine.

Outsourcing is an opportunity to flatten out the ebb & flow of internal team scaling. Radical have averaged 12% of asset production outsourced over the last few years. For them, it’s not about cost saving, it’s about flattening spikes and ensuring solid delivery.

Internal teams that define a tight vision for the product enables outsourcing asset production without compromising the product goals.

Outsourcing is a bigger and bigger part of game production as games move to larger, more open worlds that need more content – expanding the team temporarily is less suitable in the game space than it is in the movie space.

Promoting someone into management just because that’s the next step up the chain isn’t necessarily the way to do it – some people are better if they keep doing their role so look for ways to provide advancement opportunities that don’t result in your people suddenly having to do something else

The common thread in these discussions for Shaun was open and honest communication with their teams.

Giving people opportunities as a group and seeing how people handle it is the best way of identifying future leaders – don’t tell people this could happen, simply enable it and see who stands up.

Employee evaluation should be less about numbers and more about assessing the employee’s impact on the team and the project; we’re doing stuff that people have often never done before so comparing to a preset scale has limited relevance.

Employee evaluations, the formal ones, should be a summary – there shouldn’t be any surprises in there. Problems and praise should be raised in real time or at least far more frequently. Having epic scary meetings once a year basically ensures real, good communication can’t happen.

Sharing tech across teams during development is harder than pulling cool stuff out of a finished title and putting that back into a shared tech base that other teams can start from. Sharing tech in real time across disparate teams and products is hard / not a good idea in practice.

If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail – it’s important to have lots of tools in your management toolbox.