Introduction to the Blue Buddies Organization
Blue Buddies was originally a family business and the Dexter family is still the largest single shareholder even though their shareholding is under 5%. Their presence on the external board is largely honorary now. Frank Dexter was a solid state physics graduate who specialized in the development of hard drive storage and access protocols. Both his son and nephew, best friends from their earliest years, had graduated with majors in mathematics and physics respectively. These two, Marc and Stephen, were among the earliest gamers and had a vision for the industry. They built the company into a profitable and successful one and largely liquidated their shareholding in the mid-25’s.
The organization still holds strongly to the values of fairness, integrity and innovation that the original founders had. Blue Buddies appears to new employees as an organization which can achieve good outcomes but can be rather sloppy and unsystematic in the way that it got there: it marches to its own drum. In the past, new console launches have been delayed by up to 6 months. When it has mastered something as an organization, it can be quite good at ongoing execution. However, when it needs to do something quite different from ‘business as usual’ it struggles. It lacks a ‘project management’ discipline which is usually taken for granted in most organizations in the technology industry.
Blue Buddies employs over 5500 staff. 85% are in the Roundland continent, the majority being located in three factory sites linked to distribution hubs – East Coast, Mid-Continent and West Coast. Head office consists of 500 people, and the Research Centre 800 people. The remaining Roundland employees are in Sales, spread across the Roundland continent. The 825 employees located in the Starland continent are mainly in Sales with some minor local support functions.
