I love how easy it is for enterprise organisations to make the smart moves once shit the fan. Two good choices for leadership both based on their previous work and the fact that they are new within Blizzard and aren’t tainted by the horrible working culture like every other current high level manger.
Of course it’s something they’ve likely prepared to do as a contingency since January.
I don’t agree with people calling J. Allen Brack a scapegoat considering his role in this. There are YouTube clips of Blizcon WoW panels being lead by him where the named director that I can’t recall the name or is making misogynistic jokes that the panel continues with. He’s also worked so close to these people that he must have known and failed to act, unlike the head of Activision. Bobby Kotick may be disliked, I don’t know much about him other than that, but anyone that’s worked at the higher levels of an Enterprise organisation knows that the key decision makers are so far detached from reality that it’s sometimes painful to work with them. Not that they are delusional or incompetent, but they simply operate on a whole other plane than the rest of the organisation and that means you have to trust your governing body.
Maybe Kotick needs to go as well, but I don’t see any reason Blizzard shouldn’t be making this move and they should frankly be replacing every single manager and middle manager that has been anywhere near the disgusting bullshit if their goal is to alter the culture.
Kotick settled a lawsuit about a 2007 incident (before the Blizzard merger) where he allowed ongoing sexual harassment of a flight attendant on his private jet, then fired her when she complained about it. He has a history, and it's reasonable to suspect that he is a primary source of the rot.
Brack is obviously not innocent, but that he's the only one being ousted does suggest that Kotick is trying to lay all the blame on him.
$461 million in total compensation since 2007. Not sure what it was before, but private jets run between $1-90 million upfront, with hourly costs in the air of $2-12k; not sure about maintenance, but given it was co-owned, so presumably half those costs, it doesn't seem out of range. Insane, private jets in general are, but not out of range.
You can change leadership, but changing a whole company culture is extremely hard. It's not something you change overnight, and it takes a lot of active effort, with people fighting back and complaining about "back in my days, we could do X".
Of course it’s something they’ve likely prepared to do as a contingency since January.
I don’t agree with people calling J. Allen Brack a scapegoat considering his role in this. There are YouTube clips of Blizcon WoW panels being lead by him where the named director that I can’t recall the name or is making misogynistic jokes that the panel continues with. He’s also worked so close to these people that he must have known and failed to act, unlike the head of Activision. Bobby Kotick may be disliked, I don’t know much about him other than that, but anyone that’s worked at the higher levels of an Enterprise organisation knows that the key decision makers are so far detached from reality that it’s sometimes painful to work with them. Not that they are delusional or incompetent, but they simply operate on a whole other plane than the rest of the organisation and that means you have to trust your governing body.
Maybe Kotick needs to go as well, but I don’t see any reason Blizzard shouldn’t be making this move and they should frankly be replacing every single manager and middle manager that has been anywhere near the disgusting bullshit if their goal is to alter the culture.