An effective CEO has at least a theoretical understanding of what the various employees in his company do, that while they may not know how to program they at least know what programming entails.
To not use the products your company produces is arrogance if not idiocy. How can you lead except by numbers in that situation?
Remember when the CEO of Motorola got their email printed out by their secretary? Ignorance like that reduced them from the dominant force in the industry to a pet of Google.
In fairness to Bobby Kotick, he took Activision from a small publisher filing for Chapter 11 to one of the biggest companies in the business -- and arguably, one of the companies largely responsible for the mainstreaming and explosive growth of the industry.
He may not be a gamer, and he may receive a lot of flak for his brazen "I just crank out IP; I'm not trying to make art" attitude. But as a CEO, it's hard to argue with his track record over the last 20+ years. As to whether he's qualified to lead Activision in the post-mobile world, well, that remains to be seen. Innovator's Dilemma.
He's been there since the early 1990s, and the first CoD, Guitar Hero, etc., properties came out under his watch. As to milking them as franchises -- hey, from a business standpoint, it's been printing insane amounts of cash. It's not creatively satisfying, and I'm not defending it as the height of entrepreneurial adventurism or innovation. But he found and perfected what became the definitive business model for the industry. Regardless of what you think of his practices, he's been successful.
What I mean by all this is it seems Bobby Kotick could hardly care if he's running a multi-national pizza franchise, a music label, or a construction conglomerate. He's just a numbers guy.
It's really hard to tell if someone like Kotick is running the business in a sustainable fashion, or if he's just beating all the value out of the company, getting in a good run, and then dumps the company in someone else's lap when it's exhausted.
An effective CEO has at least a theoretical understanding of what the various employees in his company do, that while they may not know how to program they at least know what programming entails.
To not use the products your company produces is arrogance if not idiocy. How can you lead except by numbers in that situation?
Remember when the CEO of Motorola got their email printed out by their secretary? Ignorance like that reduced them from the dominant force in the industry to a pet of Google.