Hi Brad, and also anyone on the forum please feel free to comment,

Anyways, I just wanted to say I discovered Stardock when you guys were still working on the original Galactic Civillizations - and I must say I fell in love with the company.

However, I do have some concerns going forward. I think it might be easy to manage a small firm and ensure good quality products.  However, with the release of Elemental it seems Stardock is beginning to transition from a small firm, that can be easily managed from the top-down by a single individual, to a much larger bureaucracy.  At this stage in the business, I think corporate management might need to take a transition from one where management is centralized to one that is very decentralized.  I imagine you have already decentralized much of management throughout the company, or else you would have surely had a stroke by now.

The key question though, is how do decentralize management while still ensuring the company is known for quality and can still attract the love and adoration of its customers that it was able to as a small enterprise.  The answer, I believe, is you need to seek a corporate system, a culture, which ensures the system can manage itself towards maximum quality.  This goes beyond just quality of the end-product, but also ensures maximum quality in inter-department communication, maximum quality in employees (both performance and job satisfaction), and maximum quality in management.

As your firm progresses forward to a larger enterprise I would absolutely hate to see it go the way of most large firms, where all aspects of quality fade and the company loses its "soul" and becomes just another bloated inefficient firm.

To this end, I can't recommend enough (if you haven't already) that you read W. Edward Deming's "Out of the Crisis," which lays the framework for Total Quality Management.

It was written in 1986 and I think the vast majority of large firms still suffer from most of the problems Deming outlined.

Here's an excellent review on Amazon that highlight Deming's 14 principles and what he describes as the 7 deadly diseases:

W.Edwards Deming is one of the leading thinkers of modern management as a key originator of total quality management. D.Wren and R.Greenwood write, in their 'Management Innovators,' "Deming was critical of U.S. management, perhaps because he had been ignored far so long, but more probably because U.S. firms were losing market share to more quality-oriented competitors. He blamed U.S. management because the wealth of a nation did not depend on its natural resources but on its people, management, and goverment: 'The probem is where to find good management. It would be a mistake to export American management to a friendly country.' "

In this context, in Chapter 2, in order to transform American industry, Deming presents the 14 points that constitute his theory of management:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

According to Deming application of these points will transform style of management. Unfortunately, some deadly diseases stand in the way of transformation. Thus, in Chapter 3, he identifies seven deadly diseases that cause the decline of American industry:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose to plan product and service that will have a market and keep the company in business, and provide jobs.

2. Emphasis on short-term profits.

3. Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review.

4. Mobility of management, job hopping.

5. Management by use only of visible figures, with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable.

6. Excessive medical costs.

7. Excessive costs of liability, swelled by lawyers that work on contigency fees.

I highly recommend this business classic for all managers.

As it is right now I love your work, your company, the products and services you and your employees are able to produce and I eagerly await the next thing you guys come up with.  In the mean time I'll remain hopeful that as your firm becomes larger and expands that you don't go the way of <insert 99% of all American firms here>.

Best Regards,

-Justin.

Edit: Changed the forum location, thought this was a better location for this post.