More about the dynamics of a game company like Wizards of the Coast

Hi Everyone!

I'm happy to report that my previous article on Wizards management was very popular and I got a great response so today I'm writing a follow up article. You can read the original article here. 

I did get a couple questions about why that doesn't work for Wizards but other companies promote the best worker to be the supervisor. The short answer is that while they do it, it doesn't work well there either. It's a pretty well known fact that many American businesses are run pretty poorly and one of the major weaknesses is quality management. In fact, several years ago I started saying, Small businesses are small for a reason. I still think this holds true, and the reason is typically poor management.

During my tenure as a college student I worked for many small companies that were trying and trying to grow but the growth plans kept falling apart. I thought then that there's a reason things aren't working and I could pinpoint the cause of failure, but I couldn't identify what was the right action to achieve success. Later on I learned all about the right thing, I suppose I had an advantage going into graduate school because I already knew what not to do. The reason for failure was always, of course, poor leadership.

Enough background on my experiences. What in the world does this have to do with Wizards of the Coast? We know management is important, and we know that Wizards is bad at said management. There is one unique thing about Wizards. I mentioned it earlier this week in my weekly youtube show (that's the link for the entire series if you're interested, episode 8 is the one I am referencing). Wizards being a game company requires exceptionally talented people to design and develop their games. I have a name for this kind of industry. I call it a "superstar industry". I think of it like any professional sport. Think about it. The players (designers at Wizards) get all the fame and win the games (make the cool cards at Wizards) and you hardly ever hear about their coaches (management at Wizards). In truth the coaches of world class athletes are responsible for making them perform their best, that's the same function of a manager. The easiest way to identify a superstar industry is to look at the "worker" and the "managers" and ask, can the manager do this as well as the "worker"? If the answer is no way in hell, it's probably a superstar industry. The relevant part to wizards is that there lies a special talent that people either have or don't have that allows the "worker" to be a "superstar". 

As I said before, I'm really good at identifying what's getting done wrong. The short version of what's wrong is that Wizards is promoting their "superstars" to be in charge of other people, departments, projects, deadlines. They give them this responsibility because they assume that since they're a superstar designer that they will be a superstar manager.....WRONG! People get this crazy idea that if someone is good at one thing they are good at everything. Good management needs to know that their skill at the task does not always (most of the time doesn't) translate to motivating or teaching others to being the best.

The bottom line is that players sometimes make great coaches, but have every pro sports player try to coach anyone else, the majority would be average coaches. The same thing happens with wizards, they hire the Mike Trout of designers to become the coach of the designers and his talent lies in designing, not managing designers.



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