Leadership
Game face
How Brian Farrell steers through downturns to keep THQ ahead of the curve
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Los Angeles | July 2009
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Brian Farrell keeps “Pong” around to help him with perspective.
You remember “Pong,” right? The two-dimensional tennis game is a ’70s classic, but you don’t often see the kids running home from school to fire up the Atari these days.
That’s because the industry has evolved itself into one of wireless controllers and online gamer networks. And so Farrell, the chairman, president and CEO of THQ Inc., has never let his company sit still while the gamers crave more realistic shooting action or better story lines. When he arrived at THQ in 1991, the company only worked in licensing, but today, his 2,000 employees put the company’s fate in its own hands, creating innovative games from its own studios
“Look at the music industry,” he says. “The business model changed, the music industry tried to reject it and consumers rejected them instead. We’re committed not to be in that. Our consumers are online, they’re consuming online, let’s go there with them, let’s lead them there.”
Along the way, Farrell and THQ have suffered through downturns that have had Wall Street calling for a coroner — losing rights to a wrestling game that made up 50 percent of its revenue at the time and the dot-com bust at the turn of the century. But each time the company has retrenched itself, and as a result, it pushed out 13 consecutive years of growth.
“So we’ve faced these challenges; that’s one of the reasons that although we’re driving very hard on this current turnaround, we’ve faced at least two other periods of pretty severe adversity,” Farrell says. “You put together a plan, get people on board by communicating with them honestly about what the challenges are and what we’re going to do about it, and then you put your head down and go do it.”
So when THQ posted its fiscal 2009 net sales of $829.96 million, its first year without growth since around the time the Nintendo 64 hit the scene, Farrell looked back to other times when changes needed to be made and used that basic format. Starting by using his already planned travel to address the troops, he later made sharp cuts and then got everybody to focus on the task ahead.
