Corner Office | John Riccitiello: Electronic Arts’ Chief, on Painting a Consistent Picture

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. I was 15, and I was selling lawn services door-to-door. I was successful as a salesman, and they promoted me to be a manager, and then they found out about my age. I was supposed to drive the van, but I wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license at first. I had the responsibility of actually hiring other salespeople, mostly between the ages of 15 and 25.

Q. Any sense of why they gave you the job?

A. I generally think, especially early in a career, what distinguishes leaders oftentimes is whether they paint a picture. The word “vision” can sometimes be horribly overused, but they paint a picture of the way it’s supposed to work, and it resonates with people. And so I think at that point I had a view that we could generate a lot more revenue per household if we bundled some services. It was a logical way to sell, and it worked really well. They wanted me to teach other people to do the same thing.

Q. What about management roles after that?

A. I was put into some pretty heavy responsibilities early on. I ran Häagen-Dazs International in my late 20s. I was the C.E.O. of Wilson Sporting Goods in my early 30s, and I came into Electronic Arts as its president and chief operating officer when I was 37.

Q. Talk about some of the leadership lessons you’ve learned.

A. When you’re working on a business and it’s small, you’re a clear part of the equation yourself. When you get the scale, though, you’re mostly painting a picture for a lot of people for whom you’re just a concept, as opposed to a friend. So you’ve got to find a way to be incredibly consistent, so when other people repeat the same thing it conjures up the same picture, the same vision for everyone else.

With E.A. four years ago, we were in this interesting spot where our traditional business was in trouble. I could clearly see this digital transformation around social networks and mobile phones. But people are afraid, and you need to paint a picture that everyone can buy into, even though you’re not even sure yourself it’s going to work because you’re trying to see to the other side of a technology transformation. And if you’re not confident, then they remain scared.

The key thing is to really listen to the people on your team to make sure you’re not heading left when you should head right. But you’re constantly adjusting. I’ve often said to people: “This is only 70 percent clear because that’s as clear as it can be. But you have to commit to it 100 percent, and understand that we’re going to pull back and adjust when we learn something’s not working.”

I remember getting a question a year and a half ago: “Why do we have 15 things going on here if we don’t know which ones are going to work?” And I said, “Here’s the way this is going to work: If certain things work, we’re going to do more of them, and if other things don’t work, we’re going to stop doing them. And in no time at all, 80 percent of what we’re doing is going to work because it’s very easy to quickly eliminate the failures, and we should not be afraid of that.”

Q. Any new insights from the last few years about leadership and management?

A. One of the things I would say is that you have to be absolutely genuine. You have to know what you truly believe and what you truly value, and it has to be undeniably consistent. When you’re looking at a global transformation, you don’t know exactly how you’re going to make money on the other side. But if you stop being consistent, then nobody has the confidence to go along.

So while we were going through this radical transformation as a company, everyone could count on two things: that quality came first, second, third, no matter what we were going to do. You could be sure that while we were cutting, we were never going to sacrifice the quality of our product.

And the second thing is that if you were a key contributor to a process of bringing a great product to market, not only were we going to support you, but my No. 1 job is to get the blockers out of the way so your product can find a marketplace. Those were the two things that were consistent. Everything else changed. I think if you’re going to ask people to go along with you, when almost everything they know about their job, their company — how it makes money, how it works, how Wall Street is going to view it — is going to change, you’ve got to pick a couple of things and stay with them. We had to have something that was foundational. And so everyone knows what I stand for. They’re not going to follow you if they don’t know what you stand for.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=cc21c669dc8a7fa11471ec2cbcda220b