Growing Pains

"I'd been on the board of THQ for a long time," Lapin says. "Brian needed to get out and be with shareholders and investor relations. He needed somebody to do operating functions. We split up the company. I got product development, business development, legal, and licensing. The company was being run almost as if it was a family -- which was good, but it needed to become more corporate. Not too corporate, however. You have to give people authority, but you still need to have checks and balances. We manage by walking throughout the company as often as we can."

Lapin learned the hard way how to make changes with just the right touch. One time, he was hired to reengineer a struggling company. He went in and fired half of the company's employees during his first week. It was the right thing to do, but the way that it was executed was, well, like an execution. The lesson that he took away from that experience was only one of the many lessons that he learned by moving from one business to another. By working in various industries -- hotel management, pharmaceuticals, real estate -- he gathered a toolbox of universal management skills at a highly professional level.

"The most important factor in how bad morale is brought about within a company of this size is lack of communication," Lapin says. "The silence. Everybody thinks that something is wrong when that happens. This place is email-crazy. I answer email as quickly as possible -- within two days. I'm still getting my fingers dirty with the people who actually generate the product and make money for the company. I like that."

To shatter that silence, Lapin not only put into place new systems for communication throughout the company at large, but he also made sure that top management officials met with one another regularly and shared more information than they had ever shared before -- even though neither he nor Farrell attend many of those meetings. He also made it every department's responsibility to know about all of the other departments, and he created new paths for decision making: sequences, checkpoints, milestones. He taught his group of senior managers about the balance between delegation and empowerment, and about the need to keep track of projects, to monitor progress, and to offer guidance.

Breaking the silence in this way is the single most important way that THQ has attempted to manage its growth. And the company has written a number of other rules for success: Stay humble. Don't get greedy. Bird-dog return on investment. Quit trying to know everything. Hire the right people. Stick to the knitting of what the company knows. Put professional project management into place. Take big risks only when it's absolutely necessary to do so.

In many ways, Lapin's philosophy has meant that what used to happen spontaneously now must happen systematically. THQ has put into place systems that break corporate silence but that, in the process, pillage old allegiances. This is especially true in the way that people communicate now. Everyone knows everyone else's business now -- through email and voice mail, stringent reporting structures, weekly meetings -- even though everyone in the company no longer knows everyone else's name. The whole company used to gather for quarterly meetings in the kitchen. Now it has to rent the recreational center across the street from the office. What used to be a family tradition of watercooler confessions feels more and more like a violation of privacy. Suddenly, everyone in the company wants to know how you're doing, but in a way that isn't always comfortable. In the past, the producer and his key people might have been the only ones who talked about your progress, but now people in marketing, sales, and finance have started to pry into the process. Everyone depends on everyone else, and many supervisors and managers who know the most intimate things about your successes and failures can still be strangers.

Most of all, Lapin taught people how to hire and fire, how to let go and say good-bye to employees who are faithful and good but who don't want to grow with the company. And that is precisely the situation that Gabriel Jones is in. Lapin's regime has impinged on Jones's life and his work, and now Jones must decide whether to adapt and stay or to leave THQ and work for a smaller organization. Lapin has drawn a line in the sand. Jones, and others like him, must walk across it -- or walk away. Unlike many people who have left the company, whether or not Jones crosses that line is largely up to him. It's a matter of choice.