http://www.amazon.com/review/RFPJ70HJKL6N7/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0131855239&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=#wasThisHelpful

“Fred Mertz says:
“Take the Money and Run”

The end result of Rusty’s 8-year stint at EA was a human resources management style that crushed its talent force in a never ending downward spiral of tighter deadlines and longer hours (often 7 days a week). Predictably this caused many artists and programmers to leave, creating a product-specific knowledge vacuum, which, with a yearly product cycle for franchise titles, leaves no room for innovation. -i.e., when you’re trying to figure out what five engineers and two artists did to make the gameplay work on the previous version and you’ve got two months to make asset lock for a holiday release, you can’t spend time filling all the requests from marketing/ senior management for “more” and “better”. Hence the common complaint amongst gamers that EA sells the same game again each year with new packaging.

On a side note… in March of 2005 four class action lawsuits charged that EA released inflated earnings projections (via a conference call to investors on January 25) just before issuing its first ever mid-quarter profit warning on March 21 which resulted in a dramatic dip in EA’s share price. Shortly after the projections, top EA executives sold around $20 million worth of EA stock. Chief Executive Larry Probst and Chief Financial Officer Warren Jenson alone sold around $19 million in stock. J. Russell Rueff, Jr. sold $5,013,884 worth of stock on January 28th, 2005. You can find that here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=ERTS Both the warnings and the announcement of the suits resulted in EA’s stock taking a tumble of over 20%.

Meanwhile the result of Rusty’s human resource management abilities came to fruition in October 2005, when a settlement of a lawsuit over compensation for artists was announced, to the tune of 15.6 million. And in April of 2006, EA announced that it will be settling another suit from their engineers for 14.9 million (this suit was filed in 2004).

Rusty Rueff resigned from EA in October 2005. Don Mattrick, president of EA Worldwide Studios, departed a month earlier. Bruce McMillan, executive vice president of the studios, also left around the same time.

I may have a different opinion than the reviewers who seem to be acquaintances of Rusty’s, but I would highly recommend this book if your goal is an employment model where developers work under (mostly) incompetent (and sometimes insane) senior management, relying on the work ethic of the staff to make up for unrealistic scheduling (or no scheduling whatsoever, in some cases), until the whole thing falls apart. You can always take the money and run. “