- i relate.

good article, good advice.

In my experience having a guy who knows he is always right at the helm is a good way of ensuring that you do not retain people who have their own ideas.

Yeh, but in that case, he’s really better off not listening to his people, anyway. No matter how bad he is, they’re sure to be worse.

Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is just sounding less and less an impossibility.

Here it is again, another reliable method - ensuring your prophecies always come to pass - of achieving the ability to be “always right”.

Example, or so I’ve heard: Marketing wonks. They cannot predict success, but they can predict failure with 100% accuracy.

Granted, all this also seems more and more divorced from success; but maybe that’s not your goal.

I mean, you could be a corporate saboteur whose real mission is to produce spectacular failures while appearing to be some sort of genius-variation of an idiot-savant. Thereby moving yourself up the corporate ladder, one flop and a time, to within striking-distance of the head.

In such a case, what good is Scott’s advice to you here?

Ha! No good at all!

I am intrigued to know which EQ2 change you felt was wrong.

To his credit, he bats about .600 on them, which is a really good average. But OMG, you should see some of the other 40%. *shudder*

The benefit of that model is in having one guy who is in charge.

It ought to be so beneficial that it’s worth the trade-off of him being wrong from time-to-time, even if he also professes to be brilliant and claims that he is always right.

It’s just that most likely anyone who actually believes the “brilliant” and “always right” thing about themselves is probably wrong a whole lot, about a lot of things.

Then it’s no longer worth the trade off.

And that’s before you even get to how much working for someone like that sucks. I mean… it’s pretty irritating to worth with someone like that.

When they’re in charge, there’s also the issue of how strongly it repels competency, and how improbable it is his delusional leadership of an incompetent team will realize success.

Best you could hope for would be a failure that you can be proud of. One of those “The market just isn’t ready for it” flops.

So that’s all a horror.

Accumulating competency and utilizing it is way more important than whether any individual decision is right or wrong.

So I’ll wave the “brilliant” flag and raise my big “infallible!” foam finger in support of the head dude’s decisions to help him be in charge, if him being in charge builds competency and utilizes it.

That is, only for so long as his infallible decisions come after, “What do you think?” and “Let’s ask so-n-so for her opinion,” and so on.

Plus from time to time, “I disagree with all of you, but ok… We’ll do that.”

‘Cause then if it turns out the team was right, then you were right to go with their opinion. But if the team was wrong, then - hey, everybody! remember? - you were the only one who was right. They can hardly fault you for having trusted their opinion.

It’d be ideal if all your decisions could be rigged like that. So that no matter what, you were always right… but you’d have to be brilliant to manage that.

Hey!

Are you sure this is an outdated vision? It sounds great!

On the rest of the article, you are spot on, however its always nice to have a someone, or several someones who you can run those ideas by, regardless of how you feel and see what that group thinks. Call it your control group, or your BS detector or whatever label you want to slap on it. I realize that group (as you mention) becomes conditioned over time to respond in a way you will view as favorable, and the soltion on that is to rotate it, or always be seeking fresh “controllees”.

“Hello, this is GM Blahblahblah, if you have a couple of minutes I would like to show you some new features from an upcoming patch, and get your feedback. If you have ventrillo and are ready, we can begin right away !” Pipe dream ? Maybe.

I can’t help but wonder if such a system was in place (truly in place, not theoritically or kind a) what the responses would have been on things like the casting timer addition for quest interaction, or the change to status turn ins relative to guild level.

It would probably help a whole lot on the consumer end if these changes were documented better, with some type of accompanying reasoning attached, for I know quite a few people are often left scratching their heads and trying to understand not only what you had in mind with the changes, but why you ended up choosing that particular route.

When such amazing things are released like the dressing room, alternate appearences, the revamp on icons for harvest items etc, we all cheer as we sit in our chairs and experience them in game. What a great team. How thoughtful ! How clever ! These guys rock so hard I can’t believe it.

And then the Edsel changes come out and crash into the gamescape like a lead ballon on fire, and we have to wonder what is going on. Truly.

Nice article.

But even then, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things the ‘non-experts’ can offer. I may know a lot about MMOGs compared to most of my friends, but some of them have played EVE roughly 1000x longer than I have. My opinions/views on the game are mostly not my own at this point; they’ve been heavily colored by the first-hand knowledge these other folks gained through actual play.

Mostly I kinda wish people would stop taking themselves so damn seriously.

Even if you’re the most well studied person in the world, that only means that your opinions, or rather your conclusions, have a little more weight, but does not mean you’re always right either, even in your area of expertise. You always have to be able to take in new information, process it, and adjust your course of action as needed. That’s just good management.

In regards to your Henry Ford quote.. good quote.. but Ford was a very bad autocrat and not a good example for being flexible like this. His quote is pretty close to right on, but if only he practiced what he preached.

I really hope you keep this up Scott! I like posts like this that are from your experience but wrap around or bring to light a fundamental concept that we can all benefit from remembering. =)

Oh, and just be true to these words. I should disclaim that even my thoughts that I’ve jotted down here are just my theories and opinions. Like every other piece of information you take in, could also be way off the mark. =)

Cheers,

Nick