There are a bunch of interesting books in the library section of Scott Miller’s bio. Two that I’ve read recently are “Focus” and “Positioning“, both by Al Ries. My motivation was to get a better sense on how to focus the work of the IGDA and position it in the minds of developers. Both books are extremely insightful and have, for the most part, lead myself and the IGDA’s board of directors on our current path of recharging IGDA batteries, etc…

From a game dev/biz point of view, I’d say these books are as equally powerful and important. An obvious recommendation is to stick to what you are good at (ie, focus on your strengths). Surprisingly, it is amazing to see so many developers not heed this obvious advice… Not-surprisingly, those that do, have amazing success (think id with FPS games or BioWare with RPGs). In many ways, a successful developer can become so synonymous with their successes that if they try to do anything else, it would likely be met with failure…

One area we often see this happen is with “line extensions”. That is, putting your logo/brand on a different product. Say BioWare wants to bank on their reputation and success as an RPG developer and decided to “extend” into racing games. While BioWare might think “BioWare” means quality and credibility, consumers most likely think that “BioWare” means great RPG games. So, best to stick with RPGs ;)

A related concept is that of trying to improve your weaknesses. It is fairly intuitive to try to better your weaknesses since you are already good at your strengths. This is a waste of time. Any effort not spent focusing on that strength is wasted. Interesting.

Further, when assessing your strengths/etc, it is usually not what you think they are. To truly understand where your focus lies or what position you hold requires you to look outside your company (or yourself for that matter), and learn what consumers think.

Anyway, hard to express the axioms distilled in these two books. But, in short, you are what they say you are…