the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is…
If you are running a business, your goal, generally, is to make money. A lot of people go to business school to learn how to do it, and…
There’s a reason why every smart person I know with an MBA considers their MBA worthless.
But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.
If you want to lose the Vietnam war, the first thing you do is discard what cannot be easily measured.
Bungie, notoriously data-driven, keeps making decisions designed to keep players around while losing players. Me, notoriously research-driven, offered advice, and when they took actions that lined up with my advice (because, again, I do not have any evidence that they used me as a resource, only that when their decisions matched my unsolicited advice, they did well), and when they did not, they did poorly.
You see, one of the most important things, which is true of both plants and people, is that you’ve got to let them lie fallow for a while. A field cannot support the same crop forever. You must intentionally let the field lie empty, producing nothing… because fields are more like batteries. A field ‘charges up’ with nitrogen and other nutrients, and then, when it’s ready, you begin using it by planting crops in it. When you’ve used it up, you let it lie fallow, let it rest, and then you come back to it.People are the exact same way.
nostalgia sits on a ten to fifteen year clock. Successful reboots tend to take time. Lots of time.
There is only one way to run a successful, sustainable business, rather than one that burns too bright and burns the fuck out. There’s a way to succeed without disastrous consequences, to make more money than these fuckin’ bozos ever dreamed of: and that’s to make something people want to spend money on instead of fucking around with balance sheets and trying to convince yourself that makes you good at what you do.
“I can’t measure it,” said McNamara, “so it must not be important.”Fuck you, McNamara. May you and Kissinger burn forever.
Metrics are McNamara Fallacied to hell. Money can be easily measured, so there’s no reason to try to measure things that can’t be measured, like “what is people’s sentiment around Valve?” or “how can we get people to trust Valve to make quality games?”
It’s hard to measure, but I have seen data that indicates that yes, in fact, chasing bigots away actually makes you more money overall. But how do you prove that? It’s very hard!)
Shipping on deadlines works. “We’ll get to it one day” rarely results in a game that matters to the players.
So, if you want to datafuck your way through this McNamara bullshit, you can, but to do it, you have to have a way to never, ever fail.
And they started losing the experts who knew how to make things and started bringing in people whose job it was to simply make more of the thing.They didn’t let their fields lie fallow. They datafucked themselves to death.
No matter what I do, how hard I try, it all comes back to this: a lot of people got into the business to do the business. They found the numbers that were easy to follow, easy to measure, and they started chasing that. They bred snakes to make snake-death bounties, but the result was just creating more snakes than ever.
Boeing killed more people than Timothy McVeigh. Bob Iger and David Zaslav are destroying Disney and Warner Bros. Valve has stopped innovating at making games, instead preferring to find new ways to make more money because that’s apparently how you keep your job there. Blizzard basically only exists because Microsoft saved their ass by buying them out and because of their old WoW Warchest.
A common refrain in every failure, from Marvel to Warner Brothers to Boeing, was this: “Leadership doesn’t know what they want,” and “leadership doesn’t trust the people who know what they’re doing to do their jobs.” It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking and datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse.It’s not that games are worse, it’s that leadership fucking sucks.
Jimmy McNerney got one thing right: there is an issue with not enough leadership, but the problem is, these fuckers think that having the position is what makes you a leader, not doing the actual leadership.
Me? I’m talking to people about millions of dollars for my next projects. Why? Because I keep people around, I help build their expertise, I make sure we share our knowledge, I am building a cohesive unit.
You learn that auteur theory is a response to a question, which is “why can I recognize certain artists in their work?” and the answer to that question, at least, the one auteur theory provides, is this:You can recognize an artist because they like certain topics and because they tend to work with the same people.You see, an auteur is an organizing force, an actual leader, and one people like to follow. Until she died from heatstroke on a hike, Sally Menke edited every one of Quentin Tarantino’s films. Thelma Schoonmaker edits all of Martin Scorsese’s. I’m not a big fan of him, but Chris Nolan tends to work with a lot of the same actors because they like working with him.
An auteur is a person people like to work with, because the auteur treats them well and leads them well. An auteur is both leader and expert. “Leadership” isn’t a role, it’s a task that must be performed, and guys like Iger and McNerney aren’t fuckin’ doing that shit, which is why I think McNerney and every Boeing CEO since has more blood on his hands than just about anyone alive today.
The Europeans more or less wanted “more farmland to make things we can ship back home.” There was no market for the African plants. But the African plants were suited to that climate, and the European plants were not. The arrogance of the scientists, presuming they had the data, led to a McNamara Fallacy Event of disastrous proportions.
(Scott talks a lot about how people like to use grids to organize and control structures that might not best be organized in grids. But it’s really good for collecting tax revenue)
Short term, number go up. This is good. Long term… you run out of shit to build. Planes fall out of skies, people stop using your service because you keep making eight episode shows. The shows get worse, less entertaining, less desirable because now that the shows are reduced cost, you’re not giving writers chances to grow into being showrunners, a massive crisis facing Hollywood right now. If you have no showrunners, you have no actual leadership — the people who do the actual job, not executives.
So you need people, and you need to keep working with those people.
Scorsese’s best movie isn’t his first with Thelma Schoonmaker, you know? He keeps getting better, because people are gardens. You have to nurture them, tend to them, help them grow.
The only people who can survive repeated failures are the people running platforms and stores.
Forfeit the game, execs. Because, you see, every single time an exec comes in and says “we’re going to do what McNamara did to lose the Vietnam War” because they’re focused on short term growth and not long term sustainability, it invariably fails. Sometimes they get off. Other times, they go to jail for 11–25 years.
When Boeing made money, it was run by engineers. It made good product, and customers knew they could trust the brand. Now that Boeing’s run by businessmen, all it ever does is take more human lives than terrorism does. What good does any businessman offer? All they do is mismanage companies chasing after the perverse incentives. They’ve lost the plot.
The world would be so much better if the people running the companies understood that products people want are what matters. If you’re a businessman and you can’t do that, you’re not even good enough to walk through the front door.
Poor quality control was resulting in bad things happening? That’s not really surprising. That’s the life cycle of a business in late-stage capitalism.
Someone builds a business. They have a product and they have customers. That business makes money.Someone with more money, almost always disconnected from that specific business, goes “if I buy this business with all this capital I’ve got, it can essentially run itself and make me even more money. I gain more capital.”At this stage, the businessman is thinking in businessman terms.You know the phrase “buy low, sell high” being used to describe the stock market (the place that all these businessmen care about, even more than their businesses?). Another one is ‘maximize profits, cut costs.” Basically, these guys think in exactly one way, and it’s this:
In a businessman’s head, you want to have few costs and maximum profit, so you lower the cost and raise the price, and as a result, you make record profits. It’s a very… childish way of looking at the world.
The problem with this is that infinite value is not possible because there’s only so much money in the economy. Thing is, since the company board’s responsibility is to deliver a return on the investment, the company becomes fixated on one thing and one thing only: costs.But you can only blow a balloon so big before it pops, and when that balloon pops, a lot of people suffer.
So, these perverse motherfuckers modified the now-illegal Corporate Raider tactics of the 1980s into situations where they get a whole lot of money for doing very little, invariably destroying a great deal of value while extracting as much as they can out of it.They’re fracking the economy, in other words, and the only thing coming out of it is a great deal of suffering. The people who are doing well are so irrelevant that in data science, we’d call them statistically insignificant outliers.
A profitable business that makes products people want, like Pyrex or Instant Pot or Toys R’ Us, gets completely fucked because a bunch of thieves and pirates extracted what they could from the company, like it was a bank vault they could legally plunder, destroying the business, and moving on.Value is being removed from the economy.
This lack of self control I fear is never-ending. A bunch of guys who have a very, very simplistic view of business take over a company. They say “cut costs, raise prices,” and then they fuck with the numbers as much as they can so that the stock market goes up.These people are not in the business of running the businesses they actually run. Jimmy didn’t run Boeing, he ran a side game where he plays with numbers a lot and hopes that will increase the value of his company’s stock.But Boeing is not a “stock market go up” company. Boeing is an airplane company. It exists to make vehicles that transport people and objects from one location to the other. People will not buy Boeing’s products if those products kill hundreds of people at a time.The stock value comes from the fact that the company makes a product people want. End of discussion.
How much money could you save — how much money could you make — if Elon Musk was relegated to the simple role of courting potential investors and nothing more? If actual engineers were in charge, doing the actual work? How much of a drain on the company’s ability to be profitable is Elon?
When McNerney says he wants to get more ‘leadership’ and less ‘expertise,’ he’s not saying the company actually is directionless and needs better steering, he’s referring to classes of people. He’s saying he wants more managerial overhead, but less people to manage — less people to tell him what to do.In other words, he wants his job to be easier.
