Gabe Newell and the Modern Company

Those of you in to gaming have heard of Gabe Newell and his company Valve; the creators of games such as Portal, Half Life, Left For Dead and the online gaming service/store Steam. For those of you not familiar with their work they are an incredibly successful company that prides itself on making great games, building online ecosystems for their customers, engaging their community, and creating new channels for their business. At CES they announced a new set-top box that will be their first hardware step in to the living room.

Gabe is celebrated on the Internet for his forward thinking and openness. On the latest episode of Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist he had Gabe on to talk about Valve's corporate structure and how the company keeps making products and services that people love. He goes over a few different strategies for his company in the internet era that he felt should go on to replace modern corporate/business strategy. Anyone frustrated with the movings of business/corporations/middle management should take some hope from this, hopefully, future business model.


A few choice excerpts:

• Valve has no real marketing/social media department. He believes that every employee is basically a marketer and representative as well as a builder. He doesn't want anyone who has the job of doing just customer relations - it removes the designer/programmer/average employee from what the community/customer wants.
• Instead of a strictly hierarchical structure that Gabe said was, "...based on bad ideas on how to run armies that usually entail people running over hills and getting shot," Valve employs a "straight line" that lets any employee pursue what they have a passion for and go straight to him with ideas that he can give them the go ahead for or not. Middle management is the enemy and where good ideas go to die.
• They discussed the Valve new employee handbook that needs it's own section, but an interesting bit of philosophy was that, "If you're working more than 40 hours a week and getting burnt out than you are doing something wrong."

Source: http://www.nerdist.com/2013/01/nerdist-podcast-gabe-newell-valve-the-company/