Igor Uroic: Welcome. I’m Igor Uroic, principal with the Alexander Group and our Media and Consumer Technology practice. I’m joined today by Brian Maihack, former global head of emerging business at PlayStation. We’ve had a chance to work with you over the years – a couple of times. Tell me what benefit the Alexander Group brought to your business. And what you valued out of the relationship?
Brian Maihack: Yeah, my time six years at PlayStation has been all about building businesses. The first major project that I worked on was network advertising. It’s become 15% of the company’s operating profit over the time that I’ve been there. The challenge you face in an enterprise organization is how do you grow something when you have a company that’s been around for many, many years and navigate the internal politics, the entrenched kind of business practices and business models? And how do you unwind some of that stuff? So my time as a leader oftentimes is focused on influencing change. And a lot of times because of how complex enterprises are, you have to stay at a pretty high level given the audience that I’m serving, which is our C-suite.
And so being able to kind of have a personal agenda around what I’m trying to influence, and then having a partner like Alexander Group that can back me up in those agenda points. For instance, reorganizing our sales org or preparing ourselves for resource investments so that we can enter a new phase of growth that we’ve been planning for. All these things are concepts until we can put a sharp pencil on it. And that’s where Alexander Group really came in and helped us really move the needle on change because we were able to not just speak about our theories internally, about where we think we’re going, but actually bring the backing of your guys’ research and your hands on work that we did to kind of design the program around what we’re trying to accomplish, which was was great. I can spark the idea and the change, but I need support moving it through.
Igor Uroic: So part of it sounds like it’s the experience and the benchmarks and the practices that we would bring from other organizations, but then part of it, quite frankly, maybe supporting and having a third party say what you want to say, but, oh, it’s a third party. So therefore we’re going to take, you know, take that a bit more seriously than we get accustomed to folks internally maybe don’t get as much air time. Right?
Brian Maihack: I think that’s a superficial win. I mean, it’s good, like a lot of leaders will take advantage of that. But I think for me, being able to go into a room and say, look at the rigor we’ve done, we’ve thought about this 200 times more than anyone else in the whole organization. How can you not say no? And if you say no, please share your deep level of thought about this problem that we’ve solved. Right? And so being able with confidence to move into those rooms with a clear joint plan that wasn’t just something AGI brought in, but a real co-assessment of our problems and authorship of a plan. It’s super powerful.
Igor Uroic: Yeah I like the co-assessment and authorship piece because we’re bringing a framework that we fine-tuned over the years. Right? But we’re actually diving into your specific issues and then saying how do we fit that into the framework to answer your particular questions and solutions?
Brian Maihack: PlayStation and Sony in general works with many, probably hundreds, of consulting companies out there. And I think one thing that I appreciated was the level of thought for implementation. We didn’t necessarily take AGI along with us all the way down to the end for implementation of the project. But the level of thought and what was delivered was conscious of our culture that we kind of discussed. And it allowed me as a leader to kind of carry on past the implementation that we worked with you guys on. And honestly, seeing a lot of the plan that we delivered, probably two and a half years ago, we’re still referencing all the stuff and still rolling it in, rolling it forward. So it’s been highly valuable for us.
Igor Uroic: Thanks, Brian. I want to thank you for joining us at the forum, having a session here with me to to sort of talk about working with us, your experience here, as well as what you’re getting into. Look forward to continuing the relationship. And I really appreciate your time.
Brian Maihack: Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Igor Uroic: Thanks, Brian.
Brian Maihack: Cheers.
