Constantly touch base with the troops
Farrell isn’t a big fan of airports.
He’s been around the world and home again, with more layovers than he cares to remember, and his next journey starts soon. But good times or bad, he believes you start by taking your objectives on the road and letting people hear them from you. Once you’ve done that, you hear what they have to say.
“I try to go out and visit our creative studios at least once a year and do a Q&A,” he says. “But tell them, ‘Here are the five objectives; here are the goals.’”
Schedule these trips ahead of time, regardless of your situation. That way, if times are bad, you’ll already have trips planned.
“I actually have an annual travel calendar starting out that puts all the key things like when our shareholder meetings are, our board meetings, and then I set a travel schedule and try to be as efficient as possible,” he says.
These meetings are about direction. And when things start to go bad, you can use them as context for where the issues are and how they can be addressed.
“So what I try and do is really educate people,” Farrell says. “… Here are the issues we have to face and, look, if I could wave a magic wand and fix the problem I would, but it’s more about, ‘Hey guys, here’s the problem and here’s how we have to address the problem, and like most things in life, there are no easy answers; let’s be thoughtful.’”
Beyond widespread travel, Farrell uses a basic format to get feedback on the company’s direction: an agenda-free brown-bag lunch. This is probably something that you’ve heard of before, but for Farrell, it’s how you drill down for details from people.
“I don’t want more than seven or eight people in the room, and it’s actually been very rewarding,” he says. “You think people might be afraid to speak up with the CEO in the room, but I say, ‘Look, this is just, no harm no foul, say it like it is,’ and boy, it’s interesting what you hear.”
From there, internal issues come forward. But here’s the rub: If you give people an open forum, you might just be inviting people to throw mud. Farrell stops that by letting everyone know he will do quality control checks, keeping names anonymous but using the information he acquires.
“What I try not to do is make it such that it became a forum so if people had to bitch, they could use that,” he says.
If, for example, someone says product marketing isn’t doing its job, Farrell takes that feedback to the marketing guy and asks about the issue that was raised to get their take on it. And whatever the outcome is, Farrell gets back to the person who brought up the issue with his decision.
In one lunch, a product developer told him that three more months on a certain game’s development would make it perfect. So Farrell sat down with the studio head and asked for more information. That particular case was one of Geppetto caring a bit too much for Pinocchio, as the developer wanted a game that was more than perfect.
“The feedback I got was … if we give three more months it will cost an extra $3 million and, commercially, it will make it incrementally better, but to an ordinary user, they’re not going to see that,” he says. “So it was good feedback, and it created a good dialogue, but I got back to the guy and said, ‘Here’s the feedback I got. We’ve already got a great game; to make it “great plus one” is not worth three months and $3 million,’ and he appreciated that I got back to him.”
