Time will tell whether this attitude poisons the magic that Blizzard possesses.

The man is a businessman, pure and simple. Remember that in the 90s EA was buying up developers and then obliterating their souls — Westwood, Origin, etc. Activision’s philosophy on buying studios these is to let them keep their independence and corporate culture as much as possible. That’s why Blizzard is nearly totally autonomous and folks at Infinity Ward can publicly criticize Activision PR/marketing people.

Does he do this because he likes his employees? Does he do this because it’s good for people, because it’s cool? No. He does it because it’s profitable for successful studios that make successful games to keep making them. Replace “games” with “chicken soup” and the same philosophies apply. It’s about making money. Making good games is a good way to make money, but if you can also make money making mediocre games, well let’s do that too. Do you have any idea how profitable the Cabela hunting games are?

If making money and keeping folks focused on being profitable — for example by keeping them cognizant of the global financial situation — is bad, you may not be cut out for capitalism. A company that is fun and cool and makes cool games but isn’t profitable won’t be making cool games for very long.

I’ve seen a lot of good leaders who were absolutely terrible managers. They couldn’t accurately predict how long your average person’s BM would take or how many people it would take to get it done, let alone predict times and labor for an actual job.

Every good manager I’ve seen was a terrible leader.

I’d much rather work for a good manager with poor leadership than a good leader with poor management skills.

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And then there’s management.”

really I always put journalists as the third.

If Kirk is the ruler by which you measure leadership then uh… well… you need to get out more. All I am saying is that Kirk is only a fine example of having an odd cadence of speech. Actually he’s a second rate example as long as we have Christopher Walken boldly injecting pauses where no pause has been before.

This guy clearly is the same as a verbally abusive spouse. Perhaps the state needs to send counseling into his offices.