The Golden Rule of Management

Management is primarily about herding people. In reality, most people are generally nice, but they will often have their own agendas and desires that might not always match up with yours. It's your duty to understand how this behavior will affect your business.

The key to this is also the key to mastering management in any industry:

Learn enough about all aspects of your chosen field of management to be able to recognize when something's not right. This is the First Golden Rule of Management, and it means you never stop learning.

Now, it might seem like you need to be an expert in everything related to computer games, but this is not necessarily the case. A good manager knows when and how to delegate: only rarely will the CEO of a company also wear the lead programmer and game designer hats. Instead, your job will be to hire people who can take care of the details for you, leaving you free to work on the big picture.

Case Study 2.1.1: A Brief History of MS-DOS

When IBM came to Digital Research's door, looking for someone to write an operating system for their new "IBM Personal Computer," they were turned away. It was to Microsoft to whom IBM turned; a software company that, until then, had no experience with building operating systems whatsoever.

From that moment on, Digital Research's days as a colossus of the IT industry were numbered, whereas Microsoft, then just a tiny company in Seattle making versions of BASIC for home computers, has become the behemoth of the personal computer world.

But the moral of the story is not "Digital Research's managers were stupid." They might have been ignorant, certainly—but they weren't "stupid."

No. The strangest act was to follow when IBM effectively signed away their crown jewels to Microsoft, agreeing to MS's request—and it was only a request at the time—that MS be allowed to license their own version of MS-DOS to other companies. IBM's use of off-the-shelf products to build their "Personal Computer" made the likelihood of clones appearing on the market very high. If IBM's lawyers had understood more about the IT industry, they would have tried the patent route, but they didn't. Along came the clones ... and the rest is history.

Bill Gates wasn't being nasty or even immoral: Microsoft was a very small fish at the time and most likely didn't expect IBM to be quite so shortsighted. However, when someone hands you an entire market on a silver platter ...

Microsoft's success didn't just make Gates rich: many of the developers at Microsoft at the time became millionaires as a result of Bill Gates' astute management decisions.

If you're setting up a large development studio with multiple projects, you will probably be dealing not with leads, but with producers who are in charge of those leads. In a small-scale venture, you might have to wear the producer hat as well as your manager hat. In each case, you will certainly need to have a firm understanding of exactly what is involved in game design and development.

In the games industry, this rule is applied by understanding what those programmers, artists, musicians, testers, and game designers actually do for a living. You don't have to be an expert in these fields, but you do need to know enough to manage the Second Golden Rule:

Communication! Communication! Communication!