Paananen: Frontline developers make better decisions than upper management
Ilkka Paananen · 20VC: Supercell Founder Ilkka Paananen on What it Means To Be "The Least Powerful CEO", His Relationship To Wealth and Risk & How To Create Environments of Safety Where Your Team Can Be Their Best and Most Ambitious Selves · Feb 1, 2021 · at 7:46
Ilkka Paananen is the co-founder and CEO of Supercell. He explains why Supercell grants full decision-making autonomy to individual game development teams.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Therefore, I would argue that the decisions that these people make, they are of higher quality. They're just better decisions than those of the people at the higher level of management make.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ilkka Paananen
Paananen: Focusing on competitors prevents a company from ever leading
“If you follow competition, the risk is that you may become, like, overly reactive, like, what Happens around you, and essentially, the best you can be is just to be a fast follower, but if you're a fast follower, then by definition, you will always follow some…”
Paananen: Most large game studios focus on control over creative teams
“The irony, I think, about many games companies, and, you know, ours at the time included, is that many companies are focused on actually everything else but the teams that create the actual games. So many of the, especially the bigger game companies are very t…”
Paananen: Companies fail from stopping risk-taking, not taking risks
“Well, how I think about it is, I think, like, in my opinion, like, companies, I don't think they ultimately fail because they take risks. I think fail because they stop taking risks.”
Paananen: Giving employees total trust automatically drives individual accountability
“And, you know, I've also noticed that the more kind of you trust people, I mean, people also, like, the way they can respond is that they get this huge sense of responsibility. Like, most people get it sort of almost automatically if they are just, if they get…”
Paananen: Success makes creating the next hit game harder due to pressure
“In the games industry, like, the more successful you are, the harder it becomes to Create the next hit game, I feel. Because, you know, when you're gonna start, and there are no expectations, and you kind of have nothing to lose, there's, like, no pressure as …”
Paananen: An absence of failure signals a lack of ambition and innovation
“If a company, like, never, ever fails, essentially means that they probably aren't trying to do a kind of hard enough thing, or the bar just isn't, like, high enough, and that they're not trying to, like, you know, innovate.”