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| James M. Ward (2016) |
James M. Ward was for a long time Vice President Creative Services at TSR Inc, the first publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (and much more besides) and sometimes indulges in memories and tales of his time there. This time, he recalls some amazingly fool excutive decisions ho chose to ignore... From his Facebook post:
"I wasn't liked much by upper management at TSR after Gary left the company. I don't do well with authority figures that I do not believe know what they are doing. So I was fairly sure I didn't have long to work at TSR. However, I didn't count on the product schedule saving my butt.
We, and I mean the company, got further and further behind in our release schedule because a great many of the managers didn't know anything about role playing product and could care less. The head of the company actually wanted TSR to do other things besides role-playing games that didn't include gaming at all.
Jack Morrisey was the head of sales at the time and he was sharp. There wasn't anything about sales he didn't know. He always maintained that we needed to have covers and back cover text six months before the product released. This concept was because we needed retail stores and distributors to schedule our products in their monthly sales budget. At the time that wasn't coming even close to happening.
Against their better judgment they made me a vice president of creative services and the schedule was my primary concern. I'm a goal centered type of dude. Give me a goal and I'm on it like white on rice.
On this topic I would like to give the product managers and Bruce Heard credit for doing the hardest part of the work. I watched them like hawks, but they did the lion's share of the work. I did think of a great trick. I had all of the game designers, and we had a lot of them, give me their entire weeks worth of design work every Friday. I didn't have the time to read all of the material, but I could spend the weekend and read one of the efforts of a designer. However, none of them wanted to be judged as coming up short on their work.
Eventually thanks to everyone's efforts in about six months we had gotten ahead in the schedule six months early on the products and our department was very happy with the effort. Sales was ecstatic and orders went way up.
Then, horror of horrors, a new head accountant was hired.
At the time I was really happy with all the editors, designers, and artists at TSR. They were doing a great job in a timely manner. Bruce Heard was working great with the freelance people and doing a tremendous job of keeping them on schedule. When nasty events like a freelance designer falling off the grid; which happened all the time, Bruce was there with a good replacement. We argued a time or two, but I always respected his talents.
So, it was a happy and very satisfied Jim Ward that walked into an officer's meeting. Unfortunately for me Jack Morrissey wasn't working at TSR any more. We had a new sales guy that was an expert in mass market sales.
A crazed head of accounting told me that TSR couldn't afford to be so far ahead in our schedule. He tried to tell me it was costing us money to have products waiting to be sold for months at a time. He wanted to have the products finished exactly one month before the product was released.
People, I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. I appealed to the sales vice president about the timing of releases. He didn't back me up at all. I went through the design process and told them how truly difficult it was to create products with the typesetting, design, and art necessary in each one. The company was working on large boxed sets at the time and they took even more time.
It was all for nothing. I was instructed to change the schedule so that releases were closer to the due date. I walked out of the meeting shaking my head at the stupidity of company officers who knew nothing about the role-playing business and could care less.
I actually enjoy following orders if they make sense to me. This direction was totally against everything I had been doing for the last year and a half. The end result was that I never changed what we were doing. When asked about it at meetings I lied like a rug. The last two years of my stay at TSR the company made the most money they ever made on product schedules. The other company officers never noticed I didn't do what was ordered to me.
I don't feel bad about ignoring that order to this day".