Are You a C.E.O. of Something? Published: January 30, 2010

This interview with Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga, a provider of online social games, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. If I was going all the way back, it would be playing on my school’s soccer team, because we were on the same team together, most of us for eight or nine years, and we were at a really little school in Chicago that had no chance of really fielding any great athletes. But we ended up doing really well as a team, and we made it to the state quarterfinals, and it was all because of teamwork.

And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field.
So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire.

Q. Based on what?
A. One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars.

So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people who you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than them, or whatever. They’re just reliable.

And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re a star player, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their head is really in the game.

Q. How has your leadership style evolved, given your experience running several companies?

A. You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep. You can touch them all in a week and make sure they’re all pointed in the right direction. By 150, it’s clear that that’s not going to scale, and you’ve got to find some way to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.

And that, to me, is a huge amount of what it means to manage. But I went to Harvard Business School and that never occurred to me the whole time. And I’d started a bunch of companies and never gotten to that understanding, even with one company I had that I did take up to over 200 people.

Q. So give me an example of what you did to change that.

A. I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

Q. So who were some of your new C.E.O.’s?

A. We had this really motivated, smart receptionist. She was young. We kept outgrowing our phone systems, and she kept coming back and saying, “Mark, we’ve got to buy a whole new phone system.” And I said: “I don’t want to hear about it. Just buy it. Go figure it out.” She spent a week or two meeting every vendor and figuring it out. She was so motivated by that.
I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. She ended up running our whole office.

Q. Did everybody want to be C.E.O. of something?

A. There are people who want the comfort and structure of a job where they’re given tasks and told what to do. I think it’s actually a minority of people. The majority of people don’t want that, but I’d say that the companies I’ve built are full of people with something to prove.

Q. But don’t most people have something to prove?

A. Some more than others. I keep my eye out for someone who has achieved a lot, so they’ve been a great athlete or on a great team, but then something didn’t go quite right, and they’re still very hungry and want to be C.E.O. of something. I like to bet on people, especially those who have taken risks and failed in some way, because they have more real-world experience. And they’re humble.

I also like to hire people into one position below where they ought to be, because only a certain kind of person will do that — somebody who is pretty humble and somebody who’s very confident.

This is another thing I really, really value: being a true meritocracy. The only way people will have the trust to give their all to their job is if they feel like their contribution is recognized and valued. And if they see somebody else higher above them just because of a good résumé, or they see somebody else promoted who they don’t think deserves it, you’re done.

My approach is that you have to earn the respect of people you work with. And so, if you come in and you start bossing people around and they don’t want to work with you, they won’t. In our company, if you want to switch teams, you can. In hiring, it’s also a sign of a great manager when you tell me that there’s all these people who want to come with you, or when you join us and we find other people are all sending us their résumés because you’re here.

Q. What else is unusual about how you run the company?

A. John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.’s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.

We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.’s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.
Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don’t know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.

I can look at everyone’s piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they’re close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

Q. What has surprised you most after you really started focusing on leadership and management?

A. The most general thing is it surprised me how rewarding it is to focus on management and being a C.E.O. And how much you get back from places where you weren’t expecting it. I’m surprised how much people at the far reaches of the organization are touched by it, and that touches me. I’ve been surprised how much they can achieve without me being involved. That’s been awesome.