The IGDA Leadership conference 2009 just launched their call for speakers.
The form is pretty brief, so I wrote some personal notes on what I’ve just submitted (so I don’t forget if/when they accept the talk!). It just occurred to me that a large percentage of my blog posts are, essentially, about Leadership in companies (anywhere) and the game industry (specifically). So, I’d be interested in any comments on this skeleton outline.
1. it changes your reputation
* your reputation is the biggest influence on your hiring-applicants
* your business is based mostly on people (games industry specific!)
2. it changes your collective happiness
* unhappy people do different things: cause problems, stop working, stop caring, suicide-by-cop
* happy people: … be the best tehy can be
3. culture is formed by perception
* it’s not what you say, it’s what you are NOTICED to be doing
4. internal and external culture
* they improve and sink independently
* …but one can pull the other up (or down)
5. changing culture
* very steep change-curve == very hard, but then … very sudden massive improvement
* starts with: who are you going to fire?
* c.f. “perception” of belief, not the statement of it
6. cultural “tells”
* what does your employent contract say?
* what is “a manager” in your org?
* how are projects structured in terms of people + human-roles?
* how much do you pay?
* what does the man-on-the-street think you are?
* what do you do when times are hard? (hard questions, hard problems, hard money problems, etc)
7. shining examples
* e.g. this
8. flaming failures
1 reply on “Pragmatist’s view of Corporate Culture?”
And of course, people network these days. Even excluding a certain forum you and I both post on, people *talk*.
It’s very true a bad rep puts people off. I refused FRD’s kind offer to do six months of 12-hour days finishing Haze, and well – I think I made the right descision!