Quote:
Originally Posted by babuji  I have a quick question..
What if you're working with a group of people, for example 4 people starting their own business and the polarities are split between the group 2 and 2??
Would that mean the members of the group are cancelling each other out? |
Yes, they'd cancel. Progress could still be made, but it would be nothing compared to what would happen with a strong polarity. I've been in this situation myself, and it's definitely problematic to say the least.
In the early days of running my games business (mid 1990s), I took on a game designer who was largely motivated by the desire for money, status, personal gain, recognition, high sales, and the coolness factor of creating a hit game. However, the rest of my team, including me, were far more motivated by the joy of creating something new and original. This team never managed to complete a project together. In fact, we attracted problem after problem, including $150K of debt and lots of broken promises. Working together sometimes felt like moving through sludge.
I tried everything I could think of to help the team gel, including a group role-playing session. But the energy mix was all wrong. After many months of struggle, I finally let this designer go, and we parted ways. It took each of us a while to get our bearings again. But I was still making the mistake of partnering with publishers who had the opposite alignment to my team, so we internally worked well but externally we just didn't fit into the industry. Finally I opted to switch to a direct sales model (shareware), and that worked extremely well for us. We went on to develop a very successful puzzle game (Dweep) that was a joy to create and eventually to publish many other games from small developers.
Meanwhile this other designer went to work for a major game publisher and ended up producing some successful titles (mostly violent ones I think). We couldn't succeed together because our energies were incompatible, but we did just fine after we split up.
That was a major business lesson for me. Some people say that profits must come before the love of creativity, but in my experience you can succeed either way, as long as you know which side you're on and build a team that's congruent. As for me I value creativity and contribution far more than money, sales, and status, so it's important to me to work with people who feel the same.