Hello friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

Last week, I attended my first DICE event ever, which was simultaneously my last event of the year.

The event was all kinds of amazing - fantastic people, candid talks, thoughtful roundtable conversations, and all of it set in beautiful Reykjavík.

I'm doing a tiny bit of follow-up this week, and celebrating Dutch games at the Dutch Game Day and Dutch Game Awards tomorrow. After that, it's time for a vacation and a few months of actual work instead of travel 😅

Also, I would like to take a moment to celebrate one of my clients' wins today.

Studio Deloryan, creators of Horse Reality, have secured an investment from Belgian VC fund ForsVC. Deloryan Hommers built her studio from the ground up, and we're already hard at work on the plans for putting this investment to good use.

Congratulations to Deloryan and team, onwards and upwards!

Today at a glance:

Essay: Required Reading as Onboarding
The E Myth
You should (probably) get a Playdate
On Unity and broken trust

Required Reading as Onboarding

Properly onboarding new hires is hard.

You want them to both understand the work they will have to do, as well as the company culture they are about to become part of.

Most companies tend to focus on the former. But if you have a strong culture and want it to stay that way, you should spend plenty of time and attention on the latter.

During DICE last week, I learned a brilliant way to approach this from remote control productions' Chief People Officer Ina Lesser.

Homework for the new hire

Remote Control Productions' culture has (at least) two major influences: the holacracy company management model, whereby people are assigned roles instead of hierarchies and titles; and the radical candor approach, which promotes giving each other direct yet caring feedback.

And this isn't just talk.

Ina gave me a handful of examples of these elements in action, whereby people were encouraged to "radical candor" each other to resolve a brewing conflict.

So how do they ensure that these elements stay a strong part of the fabric of their culture?

Simple: Each new hire at RCP is gifted the original books related to these concepts (in this case: Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and Holacracy by Brian Robertson)

With that gift comes the expectation that the new hire actually reads those books.

I cannot overstate how much I love this idea.

First of all, I love Radical Candor. It's a great book, and as a practice it solves so many persistent company and team issues.

Second, in all my years of recommending and being recommended books related to company management, I have never come across a company that was this thorough in integrating certain concepts into their core ideology.

I think this is absolutely brilliant, and here's why.

Why it works

If you were to condense the concepts of these two books to some paragraphs in an employee handbook, they become much more dogmatic.

You leave out so much, that the resulting information reads more like a set of rules than a fully fleshed out principle.

This is why I've always liked reading books.

It gives me access to much more of the concept I'm trying to understand, rather than trusting the perspective of a summarizer, or relying on my own experience to fill in the blanks.

And that's exactly what happens here.

By reading the original books, your new hires are exposed to the full thinking of the original authors, warts and all.

They will gain a richer and broader understanding because of it, which will inform their actions and interactions moving forward.

In the short term, this means that they will be an active part of your company culture much faster.

And in the long term, these employees can play a much more constructive part in upholding, sharing and adapting your company culture.

You will only be better off by doing this, and I hate that I didn't think of this myself.

Right now I'm a one-man band by design. But if I were given a team tomorrow, I would ask them to read these two books:

The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni. It would be useful both in explaining the principles of organzational design our clients, as well as to keep a positively critical eye on our own internal operations.

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Jim Dethmer. This book has been a big inspiration for me, and I'm working on ways to incorporate its concepts into my services. Having my team read it would help to make them more aware of their own behavior in the team, as well as the behavior of the teams they coach.

Over to you

I would love to see other companies experiment with this approach, and learn what benefits it brings them.

But before you start handing out books and quizzing your hires on them, I think two things are of paramount importance to consider:

Whatever book you choose, they should explain something that is absolutely essential to the way your company operates. There's no sense giving your new hires homework they won't ever use in practice.
Be explicit about how this concept is used in your company. It's your company, so the work of explaining this, and making it visible in every day operations is your responsibility. Don't leave it up to the new hire to intuit how a particular book relates to your company.

Given these two requirements, what would your book(s) be?

The Best Bits

The E-Myth: I'm currently reading this book on a recommendation by Streamline Studios CEO Alexander Fernandez. It argues that entrepreneurs need to master three identities: Technician, Manager and Entrepreneur. I'm a couple chapters in, and it's deftly describing all the patterns by which I've seen companies fail. Recommended reading!

Get a Playdate: My Playdate finally arrived, and man, I am simply mindblown by the all around stellar design of this thing. Starting up this little thing is a masterclass in joyful design and user experience. It's a small miracle that experimental game platforms like this even exist, let alone that it's *this good*, and I'm curious to see what people will do with it.

On Unity and broken trust: This Gamesindustry.biz article dives into the damage left in the wake of Unity's runtime fee announcement. There are some great takes in here from various developers on what all of this really means, and what consequences we might see in the long run.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn