I’m filing this under work even though I had nothing to do with it. Unbeknownst to him, Michael Saladino has had a measurable influence on the way I look at and think about organizations and teams. Although I wouldn’t be linking to his GDC ‘10 talk if I didn’t have a predisposition finding fault in modern systems. That predisposition is something that actually dawned on me this week.
I’ve been reading Dee Hock’s book ‘One from Many’ and must’ve been watching some pundit (or was it a mock pundit?) and got to thinking about how protective people say they are about the principles of this country. That reminded me of an argument that I used to have with my Grandmother. Whenever we would talk about the issues of the day and after discussing topics at length, my conclusion was almost always ‘we need a new government, we need revolution’. What I meant by that was simply: civilization as a whole has evolved many different forms of government, why should we so arrogantly assume that our democracy is the pinnacle of that evolution? So, like many Americans, she responded by stressing the importance of the principles upon which the country was founded. But that’s where there is a dissonance, I agree with most of the principles that helped found this country, but those principles no longer guide our country in any meaningful fashion. What do we say we do (as a nation) versus what do we do as a nation? Fiction vs. Reality.
Was that a weird lead-in to a video game presentation? You be the judge.
Wake up your team is on Fire! Why your real problems are cultural and how to change them
Summary: What’s the difference between a manager and a leader? One key separator is the ability to drive a cultural shift on a team, in a studio or across a global organization. It’s being able to identify a systemic problem and methodically refocus the lens that everyone is using until each person understands the change they must embody. But this sounds like a job for the GM or VP of Organizational Effectiveness. Not at all: any leader at any level can drive change from the grassroots as I’ve done inside Electronic Arts.
By Michael Saladino – Ex-Pandemic/EA Producer