Brash's management

(This is the sixth of eight or so posts going up throughout the holiday weekend tied to an article I have in the forthcoming weekly Variety that looks at the promise of Brash Entertainment, the first Hollywood videogame publisher, and the reasons it went from $400 million to out-of-business in a year and a half. The article and posts are all based on extensive interviews with nearly a dozen former employees, executives and developers who worked at or with Brash, most of whom understandably spoke only on background. The posts here on the Cut Scene will summarize and expand some of the key points from the Variety article and also provide some interesting details and anecdotes that didn't make print.

You can read the entire article here.

You can see all of my related posts, and get all the important background, on the Cut Scene's Brash category page.)

What does it take for a well funded company to go out of business in under two years? As I detailed before, bad choices, bad luck, bad products... But fundamentally, all that comes down to bad leadership. Well run companies don't typically make bad deals, put out three bad products in a row, or get caught totally unprepared when credit markets dry up.

It's hard to find people with good things to say about Brash's management. Mid- and low-level employees, developers, and others who worked with the company almost universally describe the leadership as arrogant, stubborn, and out-of touch. Not all the time, of course, and some individuals more than others.

As for the executives themselves? Well, they don't seem to have gotten along too well, to put it mildly. There was a lot of in-fighting, and a lot of departments working non-cooperatively, if not at cross-purposes. To give an example, I asked one former executives what s/he thought of another, and his/her reaction was, "Don't even mention that name to me." Me-ow! Suffice it to say that there was a generally high level of tension and some people really didn't like others. As is typical at entertainment companies, there was plenty of conflict between the creative folks and those in sales/marketing, though here it was even higher than usual.

Conflict, along with frustration with CEO Mitch Davis (more on him in a moment) and the direction in which the company was headed, ultimately led to defections. The first to go was Patrick Sweeney, senior VP of business affairs and general counsel, who left around March. By May, president Nicholas Longano left. Soon after, senior executive producer Jonathan Eubanks, chief creative officer Larry Shapiro, and co-founder Thomas Tull were gone as well. (Were they fired? Did they quit? In most cases, it seems to have been a bit of both)

So who remained? CEO Mitch Davis, of course, along with chief financial officer Bill Chardavoyne and EVP publishing Yasmin Naboa (who originally joined as exec VP sales & marketing), all of whom stayed until the end. Though Davis was in charge, it was Chardavoyne and Naboa who were largely running things day to day, acting, as one person put it, as Davis's "voice."

Why? Because Davis was often not around. Los Angeles-based Brash's CEO lived in New York City and spent most of his time there. In addition to running Brash from afar, he was also spending time on another company, LiveGamer, where he serves as chairman (more on that in the next post). A few people said it wasn't a big deal, that he was still easily reachable by phone. But more often I heard that he was at least somewhat out of touch, with Longano or, after he left, Naboa and Chardavoyne running things day-to-day.

Everyone agrees Davis is very intelligent and ambitious. Several people said he was focused on selling the company within a few years. Which would be difficult, given not only Brash's track record, but given that it had few assets since all of its games were based on licenses. (Though he and Longano did manage to sell Massive to Microsoft only a few years after starting it)

Others said that during Brash's problems this summer, Davis seemed unaware of how serious they were and was telling employees they would be a top ten, maybe even the number six, publisher in 2009. A positive attitude is a good thing, obviously, but many employees apparently took it as naive, out-of-touch optimism and said it only further sunk morale.

Perhaps the most troubling story is that in the last week of Brash's existence, when an all-hands meeting was called and the remaining employees were told that the company was being shut down and they would be laid off, Davis wasn't present. He left it to Chardavoyne and Naboa to deliver the news. (Davis didn't respond to several requests for comment.)