Growing Pains

"I joined the company back around 1993, when it had about 30 people," Gioia says. "All of the marketing that we'd been doing was guerrilla marketing. We didn't have money. We pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps. When Jeff first came here, I was in tears on a few occasions. I was questioning myself. I thought I would get fired. He would ask me, 'Did you go to that rodeo?,' 'Did you get the Nielsen ratings?,' 'Did you contact that athlete for that usage?' His most common words were, 'You what?' We were penny-ante criminals getting something for next to nothing. We were supposed to be in the big time, but we were little burglars--and proud of it."

It was a dramatic shift in culture. THQ hired an in-house attorney to work on its licensing deals and contracts. Gioia learned how to work at a higher, faster level. She learned how to identify the people who should be hired and those who should be fired. She let go of her marketing responsibilities and focused on her licensing duties. She created a structure where the company could safely start to spend serious money, taking bigger risks for bigger returns. Gioia survived--and then thrived--by adopting a role of absolute humility, assuming in every case that the new regime could show her a better way to do things.

"When Jeff arrived, it was like a meteor had dropped on this planet," she says. "He's my hero. He's a hero to a lot of people." She accepted that nothing but silence came from Brian Farrell's office, and she paid attention to what came from Jeff Lapin's. She lived through the growing pains, at times feeling unworthy because of that new silence, but she gutted it out.

"My attitude was, I'm going to go along with this guy, or I'm going to be fired," Gioia says. "To this day, I rarely speak with Brian. He is not the center of the earth anymore. Whenever Jeff says, 'Hop,' I make sure to ask, 'How high?' He has put the right people in place. For his birthday last year, the entire company made masks by stapling pictures of Jeff's face to wooden paint stirrers. Jeff almost always wears black. So we all dressed in black and held the masks up to our faces. Then the whole company gathered in a conference room and sang 'Happy Birthday' to him. He was moved."

Gioia learned to let go of the ways that she had done things, even though she had been proud of those ways. She parted with the traditions of hustling in favor of more professional procedures. Not everyone could make such changes. Those people who couldn't adapt found homes elsewhere. Some left, went through the changes that they needed to undergo, and then returned to THQ. Almost anyone who has left the company has been welcomed back upon returning. No one denies that something wonderful was lost in the process of hyperfast growth, but the wonder of what's being gained is only now beginning to emerge.

"We have a management retreat where we are given a bottle of really fine wine," Gioia says. "We used to be so happy when we would sit and drink that wine. And then we lost that tradition of happiness somewhere. People weren't giddy anymore. We had been a tiny little family. Was it fun to come to work! It was just a lovely place to be--a unique experience. The whole company knew everything about everything, but communication wasn't sophisticated. It was as simple as a person screaming to someone else over the partitions. Not everybody can do everything anymore, thank goodness. I remember when Jeff Lapin looked at me and said, 'Not everybody's going to know everything anymore. Gone are the days.' It was sobering."

In Jones, and in others like him, Gioia sees a key to THQ's future. "Gabe's a good example of a guy who's not very happy," she says. "He doesn't need to leave in order to stay close to a product. He could go to Heavy Iron Studio or Pacific Coast Power & Light, one of our internal-development subsidiaries. The tough thing for guys like Gabe is that they need to make the change that I made. Producers need to be suits now, in a way. We went from lean and mean and isn't-it-incredible-the-way-we-spend-no-money-and-get-things-done to suddenly making a lot of money. People who grew up in video arcades and who started as testers aren't the right people to be producers anymore. A producer needs to be articulate and polished, because it's a pivotal, extremely key role."

It's clear that Gioia and others believe that Jones can make the transition. But will he choose to do so? The company needs him--but he may not need THQ.