Gotta fake it until you make it. $400m is a lot of faking though.
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The thing about Kaizen is that you have to have processes and products to improve upon in the first place. Japanese companies are very big on things like PDCA and 4M change management, but the idea is to achieve continuous incremental improvement while preventing quality from backsliding when you already have something good.
It doesn’t work very well for product planning or business planning, where Japanese companies rely more on ideas like innovation, market research (which is an inexact science at best) and, increasingly, corporate cultures that reward trying new things regardless of how well thought out.
We are being outpaced by competitors in the rest of Asia, so there is a sense of urgency throughout industry to speed up the pace of innovation for the sake of the next new thing, which leads to bad decisions at the outset sometimes.
Kaizen is still there, quietly making things a little bit better with each PDCA iteration, but it is no longer a driving force behind corporate policymaking. As an in-house translator for a major manufacturer, I saw this process unfold before my very eyes during the last decade and a half. And Kaizen sounds more and more like a relic of the '80s and '90s these days.
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I worked at Sony PlayStation Europe (SCEE) from 1996 to 2013. What surprises me is that Sony has 30 years experience in the games industry. It’s got people who’ve grown from junior or mid-level positions to high and senior management. It’s actually managed to produce a lot of good games from its own studios and by working with other studios. And some not so good games too, of course. What went wrong here? My guess is some kind of groupthink around the concept.
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The man below says, "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude.
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So you all saw this first hand. I just learned about these beneficial process improvement tools (starting with Kaizen and TQM and other various spin-off’s and augmentations) while in graduate school long after they began their disintegration. Though, I developed respect for them and appreciated their revelations while implementing them in projects unrelated to manufacturing and product development.
So, if Concord were just another game, I wouldn’t be surprised, but a $400 million, 8-year long investment touted to be the next Star Wars? There must have been so many opportunities for responsible and assigned individuals to see how dull the thing was turning out. And that’s a real shame–though not likely the traditional variety of Japanese shame, which might not apply here with its adaptations to late Western business practices, and all.
I never saw any development of Concord, that was after I left. During the time I was in the studio, there were several initiatives to improve the success of game development. These included improving diversity of staff, reviews at key stages to weed out the bad ideas, live playtesting with recording of data on gameplay issues. There was also greater rigour in the marketing department, to identify “killer, pillar and filler” titles and support them accordingly, hand in hand with Development.
This was all in the European side of the company. I don’t know what was happening in America and Japan.
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Really good managers can walk on water.
Or so they (the really good managers) tell me.
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An engineer told his manager, "This project is the pits
A stinking crock of horse manure that gives me nausious fits,"
The manager went to his boss and passed the word along
“It’s a pot of fertilizer and its smell is awfully strong.”
It comes from…
[Chorus]
Mushrooms, Mushrooms, keep them in the dark
Mushrooms, Mushrooms, I heard the boss remark
You feed them bits of bullshit til they can’t take any more
When they stick their heads up cut them off and
Ship them out the door
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