Breaking The Wheel

A stack of pancakes
– Posted Under: Friday Short Stack, Management, Soft Skills Leave a comment

Friday Short Stack, September 30th Edition

Friday Short Stack posts are shorter, more bite-sized pieces – a little nugget of buttery knowledge before you head off for the weekend. Because everybody love pancakes! This week, it’s three of my favorite books for developing your “soft skills” – those esoteric abilities that help you work with (and in some cases around) people and their hang-ups, quirks, and egos. These are the three books that have provided me with the most utility, personally and professionally. If you find yourself struggling managing up, managing down, or just getting along, you could do worse than these weighty tomes.

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Sunk-Costs and Ugly Babies: On The Value of The Scientific Method – Game Planning With Science! Part 8 Featured Image
– Posted Under: Design, Game Planning With Science!, Management, Marketing, Operations, Production, Tips for Indies 6 Comments

Sunk-Costs and Ugly Babies: On The Value of The Scientific Method – Game Planning With Science! Part 8

It struck me one day that “Game Planing With Science” has a glaring omission: the value of scrapping a plan. The goal of “Game Planning With Science” is to forecast, not predict. It’s to estimate and understand, but not to codify. You can’t codify the creative process, or the future for that matter. Just as important is the fact that life doesn’t care about your plans. Reality is going to be what it’s going to be. You can’t change reality to fit your plan, so modifying your plan to fit reality is the only path forward. As Dwight Eisenhower, one of the most immensely quotable people ever, once said, “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.”

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A picture of a menagerie of animals
– Posted Under: Management, Marketing, Monday Menagerie, Operations Leave a comment

Monday Menagerie: Sept 26th Edition

In “Monday Menagerie” I share the most interesting articles I’ve seen around the interwebnets. This week: the two simple questions you should be asking (but probably aren’t), the four signs that outsourcing can be your best friend, and the one biggest secret to making great hires.

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A image of Marie Curie in an mobile x-ray unit
– Posted Under: Friday Short Stack, Management, Marketing, Operations, Production, Strategy 2 Comments

5 Vital Business Principles in the Form of Pithy Quotes

I. Love. Aphorisms. Sure some are pure hogwash. But the really good ones convey a lot of truth in a small space. In this post, I gathered 5 of my favorite quotes, and explain how they relate to effective management.

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– Posted Under: Guest Post, Management, Operations, Practical Guides, Production, Strategy Leave a comment

Guest Posting Like A Mofo: Volume I

I’ve been busy guest posting over the last few weeks. And rather than quickly pinch off a lackluster post for this site just for the sake of posting, I’m instead going to talk about what I’ve been up to, and where you can find it.

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A diagram of Porter's Five Forces Analysis
– Posted Under: Design, Management, Marketing, Operations, Production, Strategy 4 Comments

Five-Forces Analysis has Grim Tidings for Free-To-Play on Mobile

This post about five forces analysis originally appeared on my old blog and Gamasutra. I find that it’s as relevant today as it was then. Mobile is still a hot bed of both independent and publisher-backed development. And for good reason. There is a massive addressable market and mobile devices have high user engagement. Mobile also supports smaller test launches and rapid iteration, meaning that developers and publishers can treat mobile games less like products and more like businesses. Add to that the lack of any marginal production or distribution costs, and you have a super-sexy platform. And that’s exactly the problem. Mobile is so attractive and so accessible that the market place is perhaps the purest example of “perfect competition”, the yin to a monopoly’s yang.

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