Teamwork | Andy Billings

All right. Thank you. Well, thanks everybody. I'm really delighted to be here. And maybe just begin by saying, just really impressed with what you guys are doing at this point in your career, kind of taking out some time, probably making a few sacrifices to launch yourself into an entrepreneurial direction. So I have a huge amount of admiration for that. Maybe it's kind of just part of my credibility pitch here in the beginning, Both of my kids are hopelessly involved in startups. So my oldest is about 32. He has a startup in the area— well, he's not really saying what it is quite yet. So he's in his first round of seed financing. And 2 weeks ago, we just helped him move out of his garage in San Francisco, a garage, very nice— it was a very nice garage— And into actual office space in San Mateo. So that was like a huge, huge family and company event. And my youngest son also lives in Chicago, also in startups. And so I think what's really interesting is people like you are going to make a career possibly of startups. So everything you learn here is going to be incredibly valuable in the next sets of organizations that you belong to. So what I'd like to do today is talk a little bit about teamwork. So just kind of a show of hands, who has ever taken a formal course like in a university or high school about how to be an effective team member? Okay, okay, we've got a couple, a few. How many teams do you guys think you'll be on between now and— 40? A lot. Do you think it's maybe over 100? Yes. So it could be over 100, right? So each time you go to an organization, you're probably a member of 2 or 3 different teams. Maybe you're going to be in an organization 2, 3, 4 years at a time. And then you've got teams, maybe sports teams, and you've got social and community teams. So, I mean, to me it's one of those situations in life that we're not maybe fully prepared for. And actually, as I'm going to talk about today, I think there are actually some concepts kind of floating around in the world left from prior years, prior kind of Decades ago that still really influence what we think are high-performing teams and maybe get in the way of what's going to be most important in the future. So if it's okay with you guys, we'd love to talk about that. So background is at Electronic Arts where everything is about creativity. If we don't make a new game that's new and interesting, even FIFA, If that's not new and interesting, the soccer players in the audience won't want to buy that. So every year we have to be thoughtful and creative. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to get teams up to a high performance. We measure it. We try and help our leaders learn about those. So I thought I'd share some of those experiences. And maybe a good way to do that is just for those of you that are very unfortunate souls that really aren't yet gamers, I thought I'd just show you a few games just so you get a little sense of that. Oh, no. Whoa, great. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Cool. Yes. So everything you see in there is built by teams. So we have a game that's getting ready to release in about 2 weeks. It's a Star Wars game. We literally have 1,000 people across the company working on that game in Stockholm, Montreal, Redwood Shores, Vancouver. We have a few people I think even in Austin that are working on that game. And so they're able to assemble and disassemble teams and get them bigger and bigger. So again, a lot of teamwork goes into the background. Here's just a little bit about me and background on teams. So also maybe I could just explain my knee. How's that? When I was in high school, I mean, I didn't really— I went to a small rural high school and we had a very successful soccer team. And so I got scouted by a college in Connecticut and I thought, wow, I'll be a professional soccer player. This is really cool. Life is really good. So I trained all that year between my senior and freshman year in college thinking, well, I'm a big soccer player. I'm going to go— I'm going to have a scholarship. scholarship, it would be fantastic. I got there and like 2 days in I realized, first of all, I wasn't as gifted as any, nearly as those other players. I hadn't been playing since I was 2 years old, only started playing when I was 10 years old, so I was way, way behind all the international players. To make a long story short, I didn't end up having a professional soccer career, which is really good because I played a lot of soccer in my life and I've blown out the cartilage in my knee and so they've just done a repair job on that so that I can continue to play at EA and on weekends and so forth. So fortunately, I didn't rely on that career to make my living. So let's see, yeah, came out here to California, Stanford. I was a management consultant for many, many years. Those are some of the companies that I've worked with over the years. fell in love with this really kind of quirky, funky little company that was really struggling. They weren't really sure whether they were going to survive. I made a big decision. I'll leave a good solid consulting career, probably maybe not unlike what you guys are kind of thinking about today, went to a very unstable company. That game was called— that company is called Electronic Arts. We were so unsure of the future of gaming at that time that We didn't buy any buildings and we configured the buildings so that they— when we went out of business, we could immediately rent them to some other software companies or insurance companies that were in the Valley. So today we're a little more confident that we can make that game— we can make games successfully. So we're about $5 billion and maybe another time I'll tell you a little bit more about Electronic Arts. Also, love working with entrepreneurs like all of you guys and I do mentoring for social purpose entrepreneurs at Singularity. And just individuals that are trying to make a career as leaders in startups because it's very hard to kind of get that experience around how do you become a leader in a startup organization. If you go to a large, like some of these large corporations, you can get into leadership development programs and training programs. If you come from a smaller, if you're in a smaller organization, a lot of that you need to learn on your own. All right, and this is the organization. that I helped found it, Electronic Arts. Originally we called it EA University. We went into a really, really serious downturn. We got very much out of touch with our customers, serious no-no. And we got into a money-losing situation right around the turn of the big recession and the move into digital. And so we were about ready to— the company was potentially going to die. We were losing— for every dollar we made, we lost about a dollar. That's not a— I'm sure in your business model work you know that's not a good model. So we started this organization called LEAP, which would help the organization make the jump over the chasm, and we just call that Learning Engagement and Performance. And so that's what we call LEAP today. And we actually are so excited about team development, team effectiveness, we actually have a group in there that you can kind of call up on the hotline and go, you know, I want to have someone come out and work with my team over time. So we specialize in that. So a little bit about 2 teams. So the team on the left with the BMW and the really well-dressed person, that's a team in a very prominent European city making a racing game. And they had all the big game experts there. They had some big degrees from business universities and training. They had a pretty good team. They had a beautiful studio, the kind of leading-edge technology. I mean, even their furniture was gorgeous. And then there was another team that really didn't have anything going for it in a kind of an unknown urban undisclosed location, kind of very scrappy. They were kind of no-name people, never had launched any successful games. They had a pretty crummy studio setup, broken-down furniture, if you get the idea. Which team ended up having the most successful hit game? The small one. Yeah, the small scrappy guys. It turned out, I think, that it had nothing to do with resources. It had all to do with the teamwork in that team. A group of people that really didn't necessarily have huge amounts of training or credits or experience behind them. They were really good at teaming up. And these guys had bigger egos, a lot of issues around teamwork and collaboration, and they never could fully get their act together. And in fact, we had to completely change that team and kind of blow that thing up so that kind of could start all over again. And this team with a small scrappy— now they've gotten a lot more resources and they have multiple games going on, and they're recognized as one of the most creative teams. So what in the world would differentiate 2 teams like that making games, why would they have such different outcomes? What would be so different about those teams? So I would love to just go through and say what I think are some of the differentiators around what would make for high-performing teamwork, higher-performing teamwork than these guys.