OK .. last thought on this topic….
I re-read my response below, and decided that it was missing the context. The problem I was trying to solve is: ‘How do you make a big company into a small company’.
At the end, Sierra had nearly 1,000 employees scatter across several states and countries.
My #1 fear was that we would become a big company.
A very smart guy who I had worked with on an early project with IBM, Don Estridge, an early PC pioneer, once said (or, at least I remember it as him), ‘If you want to compete with people who work in a garage, you start by building a garage’. He was referring to IBM’s competition with Apple at the time, and how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were leading the PC wars, while IBM couldn’t move fast enough to compete.
It was this concept of breaking large things into smaller pieces and shifting creative groups as far as I could get them from corporate crap — that made us fierce competitors.
-Ken W