The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (12 page)

The distinction between drive and passion is crucial. I had asked Lenny about his
passion
. He thought I was questioning his drive and
commitment.
Passion and drive are not the same at all.

Passion
pulls
you toward something you cannot resist. Drive
pushes
you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn't just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it's not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive.

In the Deferred Life Plan, drive pushes us through the first step. The second step, the deferred life itself, is the home of passion. We hope and suppose that when we get there, we will be able to resurrect our passions on our own terms.
If
we get there.

I had passion in Providence but didn't appreciate it. I drove myself through law school and the practice of law, seeking and hoping and groping for passion but never finding it. Then in Silicon Valley—at Apple, Claris, GO, LucasArts—I discovered passion in my work. But I didn't understand the crucial difference between drive and passion until I found them at war inside me.

S
OME FOUR YEARS AGO
, I was CEO of Crystal Dynamics, then a three-year-old video game company. I had been recruited from LucasArts Entertainment, the province of George Lucas's empire that produced games and edutainment for the PC. Our flagship products were based on the
Star Wars
films. LucasArts was my first CEO position. It was an extremely exciting place to work, rich with talent and creativity. What prompted me to talk, however, when the head-hunter called about Crystal Dynamics, was the prospect of autonomy—the ability to lead an independent company based on my vision for games and storytelling. Autonomy was supposed to have been part of the package at LucasArts, but it looked increasingly unlikely.

By mid-1995 I had become captivated by a vision of storytelling transformed by technology. For the first time, I believed, computers and their ilk would allow the audience to directly engage and interact with the story. Games represented a primitive stage in the evolution of this medium, like movies in the time of the nickelodeon. I wanted the chance to shape this new medium and contribute to its evolving grammar and vocabulary.

Crystal Dynamics had been founded to ride the wave of the much-heralded “Next Generation” video games. Crystal's titles were played on game consoles, electronic boxes that hooked up directly to TV sets. “Next Gen” game consoles ran on the then-new, more powerful 32- and 64-bit processors, which provided faster play and sharper images. They were manufactured by companies like 3DO, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, each of which had its own unique and incompatible platform. Because most console games relied on quick reaction times, they were also known as “twitch” games, appealing mainly to adolescent boys with their muscle-bound heroes, busty women, and plenty of bloody fighting.

At first, I was troubled that Crystal's video games were toy-like in comparison with LucasArt's more cinematic PC games. But if the “Next Gen” market took off and if Crystal could achieve some early success, I believed we might be able to shift the company's focus toward interactive storytelling.

Just as I joined Crystal in May, the existing management team finished preparations for a nationwide road show to solicit a round of private investment. My first task as CEO, then, was to lead the road show, which proved a great success. Setting out to raise some $15 million, we received more than $25 million in commitments, and we accepted only $20 million at a very aggressive price. A lot for the time. Investors had liked our story.

The story we told was based on a plan prepared before I arrived. It rested on a set of assumptions about the number of products we would launch, the estimated market penetration for each, and a development timetable — all dependent on a deeper set of assumptions about the growth of the “Next Generation” console market. I hadn't had a chance to do much personal due diligence—after all, I had just arrived — but the plan seemed to hang together. In any case, we would give it our best shot, I thought, and if it didn't work, we could fix it later.

Back in the office after the road show, I began meeting with key people from the creative and sales sides of the company. We needed a detailed implementation plan to achieve the projections we had sold to investors. For weeks through late summer we gathered in marathon planning sessions, fueled by pizza and caffeine. Soon enough, alarm bells began clanging in my head. Crystal couldn't deliver on the plan. There wasn't enough pizza in the world to make it work.

This was troublesome for me in more ways than one. Investors had bought the plan, I realized, at least in part because of my track record at Lucas. It was
my
plan, and my fix-it-later attitude had been naïve. I felt responsible, and I couldn't let them down. Furthermore, I wanted very much to achieve the plan and move on to interactive storytelling, a prospect that was suddenly in great jeopardy.

The first problem was the “Next Generation” game market: How quickly would it grow and who would be the winners? The console makers manufactured the razors, and we sold blades. But for which razor? 3DO, the original “Next Generation” console platform, was floundering, and that's where Crystal had placed its first bet. Our second bet, Sega, was already off to a bad start.

The second problem was that my discussions with the creative producers raised grave doubts about their ability to develop quality titles as quickly as the plan prescribed. And if we couldn't generate enough titles, Crystal would be in trouble, even if the platforms grew as we had hoped.

Unfortunately, the weaknesses in the operating plan were only the most obvious of our problems. My probing revealed something far more serious.

Crystal was not one organization, but two. The people who made the games and the people who sold them were at war with each other. Both sides were led by equally talented management partners and staffed with strong people. Before I arrived the trenches had been dug deep. Frustrated by the vagaries of the creative process, the sales side blamed the creative side for failing to deliver on time and for not producing the games the market desired. The creative people blamed the sales people for wanting only “me-too” titles, for not being able to effectively sell potential hits, and for goading them into foolishly aggressive development schedules.

As summer ended, I could see that we had an unworkable plan
and
an internecine war, but the prospect of failure never occurred to me. As colleagues warned that the sky was falling, I quickly reassured them that we would be fine, that I had seen worse, much worse.

In truth, I understood the company's most basic problem and knew what to do about it: In its initial zeal to become a major player, Crystal had tried to instantly become a full-service developer and publisher with its own sales and distribution resources, even before it had produced a reliable pipeline of successful products. A sales force requires a steady flow of marketable titles to sustain itself, and Crystal wasn't capable of delivering them yet. Crystal had tried to do too much too fast.

My instincts, reinforced by my experience at LucasArts, said we should take a step backward and do this right: Cut back the sales side of the business, and retreat to the core of the company—the creative organization. Focus all our resources on developing a small number of high-quality games. Sell these games through outside publishers. Then, when we had a stable of successful titles, rebuild Crystal's own sales organization, and recapture the control and margin given up to the distribution partners. We would likely wind up in the same place sought by the founders, but by a different route and with less risk at each step.

Naturally, the prospect of pulling back from the plan did not excite the board. The success of the road show was still a vivid memory, and hope among many of the board members of achieving the original dream — quickly becoming a dominant, publicly traded, full-service developer and publisher of “Next Generation” games—remained high, despite management's growing doubts.

Instead of pressing for what I believed in the face of their resistance, I offered two alternatives. Scale up by acquiring other companies and creative teams. Or sell out. If Crystal Dynamics could find a company that would value our people, our products, and our early position in the market we could avoid layoffs and still give the investors a good return. Moreover, I would be free of my dilemma.

For the next few months, we considered candidates for purchase and held discussions with a number of them, but we never found an acquisition that made sense. At the same time, through that winter, we looked high and low for another company to acquire us. We held serious discussions with more than one potential buyer, but those came to nothing and only confirmed my worst fears: as the game business consolidated, the buyers preferred companies with far more revenue and better-established products than we had.

The board's reaction to my alternatives also proved to be divided. A majority opposed selling because their hearts remained set on building a successful independent company. There was no consensus either that we should grow by acquisition, even if we could find good candidates, because of the inevitable dilution to the investors. In something of a precursor to the Internet “premature IPO” phenomenon, some board members even suggested going public, but I couldn't see how that would solve our operating problems and refused to support it. We needed to get our house in order first. January and February came and went, and we were still trapped by disagreement and indecision.

So began my sleepless nights. They were not sleepless because of the business problems—serious as those were, I had faced worse in other companies without losing sleep — but because I began to recognize a fundamental flaw in my relationship with the company.

If I understood the problem and the solution, why didn't I act on it? Why didn't I shut down the sales organization? I had stood up to resistant board members on other issues — why not now, on the most important issue of all?

Resolution for me and for the company did not come until May, a year after I joined Crystal. That month the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the industry's annual trade show, known as E3, was held in Los Angeles. Hollywood had become enamored with the game business, and they were going to up the ante with their star power and cachet.

What did not bode well for Crystal was obvious as I surveyed the exhibit hall: several game publishers—glitzed out with dancing showgirls, pinups signing autographs, and huge screens featuring the latest releases—dwarfed my little company. We had puffed up to look like a substantial player for the show, but we seemed puny by comparison. And we were running out of time.

One evening, I cruised the industry parties with Toni, a friend of mine. A very bright and exotic woman, part French, part American Indian, with a strong aesthetic sense, Toni had cofounded a game company that made cool, avant-garde games for the PC. Her titles weren't best-sellers, but they were beautiful and innovative, and, not surprisingly, she was not a fan of Crystal's shoot-'em-ups and fantasy play.

As we whizzed along the freeway in a limo, each of us half drunk, she turned to me rather suddenly. “What are you doing in the game business?” The way she said it was “the
game
business.” What are you doing in the
game
business?

Taking her challenge, I sobered up enough to launch into my grand vision speech: We're at an early stage, but it's the dawn of a new era of entertainment and storytelling…. We're learning to put together the pieces and developing the vocabulary…. Yada, yada, yada.

She listened politely to my entire spiel. But when I finished, she crossed her arms over her chest and maintained matter-of-factly, “You're in the fucking game business.”

Her words jolted me like a hammer to my not-so-sober head.

I hardly played games as a kid. I'd never played a video game all the way through. There always seemed to be something more important to do. I liked sports, because there was beauty in physical prowess. But games to me always seemed a distraction. I was definitely not a gamer.

I sighed, sinking into the plush seats, a weight suddenly off my shoulders. “I'm in the
game
business,” I confessed—to myself as much as to Toni.

I had joined Crystal with a vision of taking the company to a new level of interactive, cinematic entertainment, but the prospects for achieving that had evaporated months earlier. Cutting back the company would have meant confronting what I already realized but couldn't admit: Crystal was going to be a video game company, plain and simple, nothing more. My
drive
said, “Stay and make it work,” while my
passion
prevented me from making the changes needed to do so.

The next Monday, I returned to the office and called in my two lieutenants. I explained what they already knew, that Crystal Dynamics was trying to do too much. Given the size of our competitors, we would bleed to death if we didn't change course. We had to shrink the company, I continued, to its core strengths. Naturally they were uncomfortable with my decision, even though they had long been frustrated with my inaction. I asked them to suggest strategies for carrying out the reorganization, and they went off to ponder the options.

Next I met with two key board members and told them my decision. We had skirted this issue more than once without conclusion, but this time there had to be resolution. So I added something further: I was resigning. I would stay long enough to help the company scale back, but I wouldn't run it any more. What was right for Crystal wasn't right for me.

In the end, my two lieutenants, whose groups had fought so bitterly with each other, resigned as well. One of the board members stepped in to lead a scaled back Crystal focused on producing a few quality games that were distributed by larger players. Crystal was finally sold two years later, a small video game company gobbled up by a larger video game company.