And this places him as a perfect disruptor. The entire disruption literature is based on that what is taught in business schools is wrong, that many executives make rational choices taught in schools that end up only destroying their business.
This story is from a year ago. But it is very revealing.
He seems more relaxed than any CEO I’ve met, but then he has good reason to. When he took over the reins at Nintendo in 2002, the company reported 65.7bn yen (then £350 million) in profit, a disappointing figure blamed on poor console sales and a feeling that the video game “fad” had run its course. By this year, that figure had risen almost tenfold, to 555bn yen (£3.7bn at today’s rates). Not bad for a man with no formal business training.
“I was originally an engineer,” he tells me, “and I joined a small company called HAL after university… In 1992, HAL was facing a financial crisis, and I was appointed president in order to help reconstruct it. At that time I was completely unable to read financial statements. I was a game developer. So I was forced to study the financial aspects of running a company.”
Having turned HAL around, with the help of Nintendo, Iwata felt honour-bound to repay Yamauchi when the latter offered him the chance to become Nintendo’s youngest board member in 2000.
“Of course, I never imagined that I would become president,” he recalls with another of his smiles.
There are many great quotes in this story. Such as this:
“However, when we started to announce our basic strategy, a lot of people questioned it. ‘Games are for kids and young men. Not for women or senior citizens.’ If you accept that mindset, you will never see customers outside that customer base. So I said let’s do it without that mindset.
This is why I raise hell when people begin referring to the Expanded Audience as ‘casuals’. When you say that, you are already adopting a mindset that these ‘casuals’ are retarded gamers. And this will cause a game developer to make substandard games. And then they wonder why their games won’t sell.
Gamers demand premium content. So do non-gamers. Just because someone isn’t a veteran gamer doesn’t mean their standards of quality is any lower.
When asked about the motion control announcements at E3 2009, Iwata responded with:
“To tell the truth,” Iwata says, “I expected them to come up with stuff like this last year. So in my mind they’re later than expected.”
He pauses, then opens his arms outstretched, with a huge grin on his face.
“I’d like to say to them, ‘Welcome to the motion-control world!’
Later than expected! This is what I thought as well. I thought E3 2008 was when they would come out with their controls. It also shows that Motion Plus was truly a pre-emptive response to any motion controls Sony and Microsoft would show off.
