It’s so easy to hate on Zynga and their quest to seemingly take over the world, one slightly-consented-to-wall-post at a time.  They’re rich, they're successful, and like so many rich, successful companies they can’t help doing some things that are creatively annoying (really, another resource management game?) or just downright dickish (demanding back stock options from long time employees).  

(On the flip side, it’s also easy to hate on the haters, who are playing a Facebook game for FREE after all…)

The New York Times excellent blog “DealBook” has a great story about the culture at Zynga, driven by the MBA and former Wall Streeter at the top, Mark Pinkus,* that made me reflect on my own exotic business experience and how that’s helped me make business decisions in games and technology.

The Times post features some strong criticism of Mark for the hard-edged meritocracy that Zynga seems to have.  The article suggests the meritocracy that has helped drive Zynga’s leadership of the Facebook game market may also be its undoing. Mr. Pinkus seems to love his spreadsheets and it appears he applies them to his employees just as much as his products.

It’s easy to hate on that.  I’ll even go so far as to say a great deal of the ‘hate’ is well-grounded. But I have to let you in on a secret, I’m a (mostly) reformed Meritocrat so I totally understand where he is coming from.  As a manager, there is something beautifully liberating about just following the data. The data allows you to talk past much of the, well, bullshit and complaints that staff can and totally do bring up all the time.   

The first time I ran a company, instilling a meritocracy was a life (if not company) saver.  Of course,  it’s too easy to rely on the beauty of theory and miss what makes a company special, not just profitable.

The first company I ever ran was a small tourism outfit in Prague that had some success but was stagnate with no growth. The company was completely reliant on a few key partners to send nearly all our customers.  It was a party business and fit for a reality TV show, so the staff of the tired company were predictably drug addicted, lazy, illegally employed and completely bereft of incentive to do anything other than show up, more or less on time, every day to get trashed, high and/or naked with our customers.**

I was given responsibility for the company and the first thing I wanted to do was fire everyone.  I wanted the owner and myself to start over and build it up from scratch, right, as a pure sales organization.  The owner was hardly interested in putting in hours though (after all, that’s why paid me enough to leave technology for a year and sponsor my work visa). He also didn’t want to deal with the backlash from the staff and Prague tourism community.  I got to fire a few people but many had to stay.  I was just going to have to deal with them.

I had to find a way to make the old staff work with the new staff, and ensure the new guys didn’t end up like the old. The golden solution was a meritocracy.  Compared to other jobs in the Czech Republic we paid our staff very, very well and I decided that only people who earned it would be on our schedule.  I created a pretty simple system with the new team’s input and it worked like a charm. 

The business tripled in size in only a few months and lots of other great KPI’s grew, but let me focus on perhaps a different metric: what I called my ‘daily dose of bullshit.’  I’m not talking about random events that come up (we had those in spades), I mean the stuff that happens every day. The stuff that you can’t help but become convinced will never, ever go away no matter what you do.

1. Entitled idiots asking for work because they have a friend
   An ‘English teacher’ (90% of the time) friend of someone, would call me asking for ‘a couple shifts.’  No, they can’t or won’t promote. No, they aren’t interested in really doing any work, but yes, they will hang out and hand out a few beers if we pay them 4x the rate of Starbucks baristas. Of course, they’re a friend of someone, so if you treat them the way they should be treated, you’ll have yet more bullshit to deal with.
2. Crappy Staff asking for more shifts
   It was never the people who deserved it who asked.  It was always well-timed though, after their one good day in a month.  Often included was a diatribe about why the managers and/or bartenders at the places we work with love them so much, as if that had an impact on our bottom line.  Often, they would add something about some meeting (with no result or follow up of course) they had with some potential partner that would, of course, be a game changer. 
3. I’m too smart to work
   'I have 2 degrees from top-30 schools (or I’m a high school drop out with ‘real life’ experience). I have 15 letters of recommendation (some of which are real) dating from back when I was in high school.  I can’t sell anything or promote your business, but I have lots of great ideas and I even took an accounting course once.  You should hire me, but no of course I’m not going to stand in the square and hand out flyers like everyone else has to do, I’m too valuable for that kind of work.'

You know what solved all of that? No, not a baseball bat and a long, rusty metal staircase.  A meritocracy.  You sell, you get shifts. You don’t sell, you don’t get shifts. It wasn't that simple. I gave people plenty of room to have their ups and downs, but the message was clear: this is a team of people who get shit done.  

Now mind you, those calls and requests never stopped.  I was still peppered with the requests, if not downright demands, on a daily basis from people inside and outside the organization for work they didn’t deserve. Now though, instead of having to address all their petty bullshit, I would just point at the policy and say ‘participate like everyone else, or I’m sorry, I can’t take work away from people who have a clear record of growing our business.’

It was fair. It was simple. It was beautiful.  It required some balance in implementation (grilling people on having a bad day is just being a dick) and a slight fix to allow people to still work on commission if their numbers dropped too low for too long, but it totally worked, and the business still uses the same system to this day.   

The problem is: making a great Facebook Game isn’t promoting a club party.  Inspiring a kid who ran out of his parents’ money while backpacking around Europe is not the same as inspiring a designer or a programmer.  As tempting and alluring a meritocracy can be, there are severe limitations that become quite dangerous the more complex and creative your work gets. 

So Mr. Pinkus, I totally get it. But there’s more than just the data. If only it was that easy. *sigh*

*Mark gets some points for naming the company after his dog.  That’s pretty awesome.    

**Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but it’s the dose that makes the poison.