REPETITION, DISCIPLINE AND TIME: A DOZEN BOOKS I RECOMMEND READING
A list of titles that helped me and might help any other aspiring producers out there
I have spent time reading about production and managing a team of people over the past couple of years and have decided to compile a short list on the topic. You may recognize some of these books, as they tend to be frequently brought up in various talks, but you may have never bothered to read them. I suspect the reason they are typically invoked in an almost hand-wavey fashion – but not actually analyzed or directly cited – in such talks is because trying to explain why they’re so significant would require several lectures of their own for both you and your team.
I encourage you to pick up the following despite their appearances as yet another easy-to-skim piece of biz lit. But don’t treat them as gospel either. As Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville said to Adso: books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry.
FIVE TO GET YOU STARTED
Turn The Ship Around by David Marquet
Marquet simultaneously recounts his tale of commanding the USS Santa Fe nuclear submarine and lays out a model of how one can change a vessel’s leadership from the “traditional” command and control structure of the military to empowering every crew member to take initiative. I was frustrated towards the end when Marquet veers away from the crew member dynamic and had hoped there’d be some resolution to their arcs (just what became of that one quartermaster?) but it is a business literature book after all and instead finishes with a summary of the lessons learned.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Solid lessons that despite being a couple of decades old still ring true. Lencioni effectively repurposes parable, stripped of theology, to explain why any group becomes dysfunctional in quick and concise manner. Spoilers: it’s trust. The answer to “how do you build trust?” is in the title of this post.
Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton & Heen
Tangential to the Five Dysfunctions, Difficult Conversations explains how you approach talking about some of the hardest topics to discuss in life with the people closest to you, be it finances or relationships. It also makes a point of understanding the folly of attempting to control other people’s reactions and about building trust that Lencioni also emphasizes in his book.
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Yes, it’s another million-copy best seller, no, that doesn’t immediately disqualify it – but I was discouraged by this book in large part because it spends most of its time using “safe” topics (sports and the classroom, usually - basketball teams especially crop up in such literature) right until the last couple of chapters. I agree with Dweck’s overall sentiment but – at the risk of sounding nonsensical – I don’t agree with how the book argues it as it feels toothless. This led into a problem the book accidentally created back when it made waves wherein people missed the entire point and started using fixed mindset as a label to bash other people. In later editions Dweck sets aside half a chapter to address said problem. Anyway, it’s worth reading despite it being a “popular” book. In the words of a friend:
“I am happy about Dweck because she represents the first anglo pop psych person to recognize the dialectical and developmental nature of intelligence & social relations.”
It is also worth looking at the foreword Dweck wrote to Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
The big one that gets brought up a lot in talks and for good reason. Careful readers might’ve noticed earlier that Covey has a foreword in Marquet’s book. Sadly, it has also inspired a lot of other terrible books in the genre with “habit” in the title. The best compliment I can give this book is when I read it, it made me want to curl up, nauseated by the realization that my actions were in large part contributing to my then trajectory. If there’s only one book out of this list you can pick up, make it this one.
Please note that reading these books is one thing – putting whatever you learn from the above into practice is another matter. Pace yourself accordingly, because changing habits and team dynamics for the better doesn’t happen overnight.
SEVEN MORE TITLES (IF YOU LIKE)
If those first five books take you, then I suggest the following extended reading:
Silos, Politics & Turf Wars by Patrick Lencioni
We’ve got two more Lencioni titles to read that are both pseudo-sequels to Five Dysfunctions. In Silos, Lencioni focuses what to do when teams start getting divided into camps, the problems such things bring and how to avoid and prevent it from happening again.
Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
Despite the title it in fact proposes more meetings, as opposed to a stereotypical Meeting where everyone attending is uninterested and hours of the day are wasted. Both are concise and easy to take in.
Key Performance Indicators by Bernard Marr
Somewhat dry but extremely helpful in understanding what sort of KPIs are out there, especially at larger companies. If you don’t know what net profit is, or why the cash conversion cycle is important, or how you make use of a net promoter score, then this book will not only tell you all that but also broadly explain how to gather the data required.
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Catmull is one of the major pioneers in the field of computer graphics and was among the first who had to figure out what to do with this newfangled technology, eventually establishing Pixar and defining an entire generation of media. He also later went on to be central to a conspiracy to fix the wages of animators across the entire industry (for which he “does not apologize”), so the part in the book where an overworked Toy Story 2 animator’s child nearly dies from being trapped in a hot car perhaps reads a little different than what Catmull might have intended at time of writing. Fortunately, the child survived. Unfortunately, Catmull and others are not in prison due to a settlement of about $100 million back in 2018, which is nothing compared to the profits these companies have made.
Great By Choice by Jim Collins
An in-depth look at how certain companies not only become wildly successful but stay successful despite global tumult. This is probably the most biz-lit-y book of the list, but like Dweck’s Mindset it’s based on years of research. Collins has other books on the same theme (Built to Last, Good to Great), but Great By Choice focuses on how companies can deal with an unpredictable future.
How Music Works by David Byrne
Byrne explores in concrete language how and why music is made, what effect that has on everyone involved, as well as “boring” topics like contract negotiations and revenue splits, and how to work out what your time is worth as someone working in a creative field. You could replace “music” in the title with “game development” or “film” or any other medium and a lot of Byrne’s book would still be just as effective.
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll
For quite some time video games and gambling were lumped together as “gaming” with the former too often being confused with the latter, despite one offering interactive entertainment experiences and the other about sucking all your money from your wallet.
On face value, the book’s premise is simple – what is a gambling machine? Considering the book’s origins are academic in nature, Schüll proceeds to go through every main aspect from the history of one-armed bandits (the arm has long since been made redundant to save on player time, and in some sense the reels don’t exist anymore either) and interior design of casinos (due to the labyrinthine design of most Las Vegas casinos, staff are trained in the use of defibrillators because emergency responders too often get outright lost) as well as the psychology behind it (how and why we enter a “flow” state and what it does to us) to the programmatic design of “chance” (gambling machines increasingly shifted away from high volatility outcomes to a steady ramp) and player tracking (one of the people from DARPA who founded the internet took their surveillance knowhow over to the Alliance Gaming Corporation in Las Vegas) and, predictably, a look at the social and political implications of machine gambling (numerous addicts are interviewed, as well as a swathe of people in the industry).
I should note that video game developers (or at least the ones I work with) do not think we are interested in trying to develop any of what the gambling industry gets up to… except it turns out that’s exactly what we are doing. Having read this book, I can clearly think of a staggering number of parallels, but we usually prefer to point to Disneyland as inspiration for level design rather than Caesar’s Palace. Free to Play games played through your smartphone have the exact same goal in mind as a gambling machine, which is chiefly “time on device”. The mobile app world uses a different word, like “engagement”, but the principle is the same – the more time you spend in front of something, the more likely you are to feed it money. To say nothing about telemetry like player tracking and behavioral monitoring – I mean, you’ve probably come across this post via a website that deliberately refreshes itself against your will just so that you will stay there.
As I got closer to the end of the book, I assumed there would be some sort of reversal of fortune (the irony of which I only appreciated when I eventually typed this out) but there is no happy ending. This is grim reading and despite being written in 2012, it still feels powerfully relevant.
If you end up reading any of these books as a result of this article, feel free to let me know what you thought of them.