Nexon Wrote:Nexon’s CFO, Owen Mahoney, talks to the Wall Street Journal about online gaming monetization

Eos Wrote:Anyone else amused the Nexon Chief Financial Officers name is practically "Owing Money"?

KhainiWest Wrote:Any chance you can copy and paste the entire article? It asks you to register to see the rest of it

IImaplers Wrote:http://www.crunchbase.com/person/owen-mahoney Seems to be a smart guy, eh? And all this time I thought there was a language barrier between management and GMS employees when their own CFO is not even ASIAN!

Eos Wrote:He has a bachelors degree in Asian Studies.

IImaplers Wrote:My point was that the communication between KMS management and GMS management was reportedly 'flawed' because of a language barrier

IImaplers Wrote:@Eos No. Why should that matter?

Eos Wrote:Because the people you quoted were all front line employees who've never met the man and have no earthly hope of conveying anything to him any more than they do the other people they complain don't understand what's going on. He's so far removed from the reality of day to day game operation of course the only thing he cares about is doing his job. For all you know he invests 80% back into the developers and assumes they're competent enough to do what needs to be done to make the games work.

IImaplers Wrote:Do you agree with this assessment?

Eos Wrote:I think you're ignorant of how many levels stand between him and his function and the actual functions you're complaining about

Eos Wrote:Let's look at where the average CFO falls in an org chart.

[pre]
> CFO -> VPs -> Directors -> Managers -> Supervisors -> Employees

CEO - > Regional VPs -> Directors -> Managers -> Supervisors -> Employees

> CTO -> Managers -> Supervisors -> IT Employees
[/pre]

Every one of those is likely numerous branches unto itself, but the first key point here is the people who actually develop the game are very likely not on a direct branch linking to the CFO any more than the people who support the game are in the same branch as the developers.

The actual number of steps below the CFO on his own tree may be fairly small in a company nexon's size, but the chasm between him and grunts isn't.

Have you ever played telephone? At that degree of removal what do you think happens to communication?

Eos Wrote:Everything gets summarized and only the good bits get passed up because no one wants to look bad to the people above them, therefore everything is always 'under control' and 'being worked on'. More importantly the people communicating with the CFO are marketing people who's entire purpose in life is to sell you a spray painted turd while pretending its gold, so his office is clearly not the place to be looking for realism. He deals with the media, with investors, with relations, not with customers. Not with the actual products.

Eos Wrote:The middle managers are most likely the ones you need to be directing your anger at, because they're nearest to the problems to know they exist, and high enough to actually escalate to somewhere it could be addressed if they can't handle it entirely in their own department.

IImaplers Wrote:Why the antagonism?

IImaplers Wrote:Wouldn't he also be at least partially responsible for human resources of his own branch, at least for hiring those in the ranks directly below his? If he's the company's CFO wouldn't he also be responsible for how much money goes to a certain branch (I.E. the tech branch might be underfunded while the financial branch may be overfunded)? This is the core of where I'm getting at.

IImaplers Wrote:Well yes, the middle managers are probably sitting on their asses doing nothing or seem to hire incompetent, untrained, or underprepared individuals. But who is responsible for hiring the middle managers? It's their own supervisors and/or directors. Who is responsible for hiring those supervisors/directors which are negligent enough to let the middle managers do a crappy job and look away? It's those ranked above them. Maybe the incompetence is seen from the top down and they still do not care. Hence this guy and his cohorts to me aren't completely excluded from blame even if they are on a different planet from a separate branch.

Eos Wrote:Stating what I believe to be the gap in your knowledge is not antagonistic. I said you were ignorant of something, not that you yourself are an innately ignorant or stupid person.



He's responsible, at most, for approving the budget projections for overall departments and deciding how much overall the company can afford to invest in various areas. It'd still be the middle managers arguing over why their budget needs to be what they've requested with other middle managers under him trying to meet his issued goals for the most part. He'd be the one to suggest adding or dropping a new venture based on performance or projected performance, but making a struggling venture perform better would be the responsibility of the team over that venture, as would requesting the budget and showing why that budget will bring a better return than they're currently experiencing and pay for itself.



You're thinking too fuzzy, at that level they think more numerically. Are they making money? Are they profiting? Are the losing money? Where are they losing money? They're going to address losses and "new ways to make more" and they're going to address those losses with either cutting costs or by pumping what they can get more out of. "Ways to make existing streams even better" comes in third if it's lucky and is generally left to the people managing those areas. As one of those managers can you prove spending an extra 10K a year on customer service to increase perception of good customer service will recover that 10K AND make more profit? Can you prove that putting in another $1.99 piece of crap that cost them nothing to make but will sell thousands will make a profit? Ding ding, profit wins, why worry about fixing anything if you're already doing good enough?

Upper Management calls the navigation, middle management does the steering, the peons paddle.