During Greg Ballard’s second month as president
and CEO of Glu Mobile Inc., a third of the company’s
employees boycotted the company Christmas party.
At his first board meeting,
Ballard told the company’s
board of directors that Glu’s
corporate culture was the
worst he had ever experienced.
“It was filled with deception;
it was filled with fear and
intimidation,” Ballard says.
“People would not talk to anybody without the door of their
office closed. You would see
them furtively checking to
make sure nobody saw who
they were talking with when
they closed their door.”
Five years after Ballard’s cultural overhaul, the mobile
games publisher has grown to
2007 revenue of $66.8 million,
up from $1.8 million in 2003.
Smart Business spoke with
Ballard about how to reinvent
a culture and why it’s sometimes best to just shut up.
Q. How did you turn around
the company’s culture?
The biggest thing I did was get
10 people out of the company.
There was a schism between
one group and the other —
there was no way the two
sides were ever going to work
together effectively again.
So I took a position; I took a
side. I said, ‘We’re going to
keep these people, and these
people are going to go.’
There was one day when
there were 35 people, and the
next day there were 25 people.
It’s a little like playing poker.
When you look at your hand
and you realize you don’t have
anything, you put four out of
your five cards on the table
and you draw again.
We’ve got a great hand now.
The first couple hires I made
after that were people I had
known from past jobs. We
built a great team out of an
auspicious beginning.
Q. How did you decide which
side to take?
One of the most important
things for a new CEO to do
when they come in is to make
sure you don’t come to conclusions too fast. There’s a lot you
still can learn once you’re
inside the company.
So I didn’t do anything
for the first two months,
other than make sure that
I wasn’t breaking anything.
A couple people threatened to resign if I made
them report to certain
people, and I didn’t. Not
because I knew that was
the right answer, but
because I didn’t want anybody to leave until I figured out who I wanted to
have stay.
So I took a couple
months to find out who
was right, who was wrong
— what was broke and
what was working. Other
CEOs … one guy told me
he would have done all of
it on the first day. Maybe
he would have, and
maybe he would have gotten it
right. But because I took more
time, I felt that I had a much
better handle on what needed
to happen once I made my
decision.
