Winning the Innovation Game

That's how EA found itself facing the greatest innovation challenge in the company's history. We knew we needed to reinvent, rebuild, and restabilize ourselves on a completely new trajectory toward digitally delivered games, and we knew it wouldn't be easy.

"Maybe the answers can come from within," we thought, as we envisioned teams of internal change agents with their hands on the flight controls to guide the company's destiny. These change agents, when assembled into strategic actions teams, might help the company adapt and thrive.

At the same time, we worried that internally driven innovation in the face of external disruption is rarely bold enough—and almost never fast enough—to be successful. And the right people at EA, the ones who could pull off these changes, had their hands full. It would take an unusual call to action to get them to rally. It would take something powerful, new, and unprecedented.

As a first step, I met with Bryan Neider, senior vice president and chief operating officer of EA Labels (our companywide game development organization), to brainstorm the ideas for EA’s first strategic action teams. It was evident from our first meeting that we were both ready to think big, and to empower other people to think big, too. There was no other choice.

Simply putting together a committee would not be enough. We knew from past experience that people would brainstorm, critique, and come up with great ideas—and then other priorities would get in the way and those great ideas would be left behind.

So, from the beginning, we needed to design our strategic action teams to be heard and to be capable of taking real action. It was particularly important to enlist individuals with a "solutions mindset," and it was critical to bring together people who gain satisfaction from finding solutions to issues and obstacles that they identify.

We also envisioned a truly global group, drawing on the expertise and perspective of senior EA leaders from around the world with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. For our first strategic action teams, we targeted directors and senior directors who were known for their passion, courage, initiative, and collaborative approach.

The first strategic action team launched in April 2010 and was charged with the lofty mission of finding and harnessing radical, unprecedented efficiencies in the way EA thinks about and produces games, from start to finish.

At the time, if EA spent $30 million in research and development to reach a million consumers, that was considered a good result. It was clear, however, that continued reliance on that model would be inefficient or even dangerous.

This strategic action team would become known as 10@10 because it would be charged with figuring out how to reach 10 million consumers for a research-and-development investment of $10 million. It wasn't uncommon at first, given the highly ambitious nature of our objective, for people to laugh when they learned what we were trying to do since it sounded that extreme. "Good," we thought. "We’re on the right track."

The 10@10 team was required to come up with ways to reach more consumers. It also was charged with examining internal processes to capitalize on the untapped resources that already existed.

Gathered from around the EA world, this team encountered more than a few surprises along the way. For one, it turned out that the scope of the original goal was too broad. So the team rose to the challenge by identifying three specific segments on which to focus: improving ideation, spending less, and leveraging existing resources through sharing and collaboration. The 10@10 team eventually came up with so many good ideas that it split into six subteams.

As a second surprise, we found that the implementation of ideas would be more complex than anticipated. In short, we had to acknowledge that the implementation of such large-scale projects would require executive support and additional talent, often with particular specialties.

Fortunately, we encountered a third surprise as well, which was that the depth of enthusiasm and engagement by the team members far exceeded our original expectations. Even with full plates, team members recognized the remarkable opportunity to make a substantial difference at EA. In fact, many continued to stay engaged even after the team's work had officially concluded.

The second strategic action team was called the Breaking $3B team. When it started, the company's digital revenues were less than $1 billion, so the initial new target was $2 billion. However, when the CEO upped the ante to $3 billion, we accepted the challenge to grow digital revenues to this amount through a combination of approaches and strategies.

Once again, we picked people at the director level from units across the company, and selected team members based on their vision, passion, and drive to get things accomplished. We also decided to start with a small core team and then add more members (as needed) when we reached the implementation stage.

The Breaking $3B team ultimately identified a series of digital priorities and then spearheaded the implementation of many companywide change initiatives in the areas of digital culture, digital accelerators, and emerging digital markets. The team’s initiatives are summarized in the table below.

Five principles

When faced with an innovate-or-die scenario, EA used strategic action teams to help lead efforts to reinvent companywide processes, paradigms, and practices. While we will always acknowledge the fact that there's always more work to be done in our ever-evolving industry, we also are confident that EA is now on the path to success in a digital world. The strategic action teams have had a lasting impact in driving EA's transformation and helping the organization win the innovation game.

Here are five principles for making a strategic action team powerful enough to change a company:

Set impossible, almost laughably out-of-reach stretch goals. The goals should initially raise eyebrows and elicit small smiles of disbelief. It's the team's job to make the laughing stop and ensure that the goals are taken seriously. This requires the team to engage in radically different creative thinking to come up with innovative approaches that help the company survive—and thrive.

Involve doers, not executives. Top executive sponsorship is important, but be sure to assemble your teams with cross-functional frontline experts who know exactly where and how to drive change. Enlist people who have the heart to take on huge challenges.

Don't settle for creativity; insist on implementation. Charter the team to float wild ideas back down to earth and see them through to implementation. And realize that implementing the ideas will require as much innovation as it did to come up with the original change ideas in the first place.

Get to "no" or "yes" immediately. In each work session, have the same senior executive group either green-light the ideas, ask for changes, or kill ideas altogether. Nothing should linger or languish. Innovations either thrive and grow or die a respectful, but immediate, death.

Treat team members like rock stars, not learners. Strategic action team members are rock stars. Give them a spotlight and a microphone to present their ideas to executives. Also, give them the right tools for learning, group effectiveness, and innovation. Celebrate and communicate their accomplishments. Make them feel like the heroes they are.

Summary of Key Initiatives for Breaking $3B Strategic Action Team