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As a teenager in 1982, Don Mattrick and his high school friend, Jeff Sember, designed a video game entitled Evolution. They completed the development process in six weeks. Evolution soon became a best-seller, and the two "whiz kids" garnered widespread attention in the burgeoning video game industry. Mattrick and Sember decided to launch Distinctive Software, a small design studio located in Vancouver, Canada. Nine years later, Electronic Arts (EA), a California video game publisher founded by Stanford MBA Trip Hawkins, purchased the company for $13 million. At the time, EA had captured an early lead on the new Sega Genesis hardware platform, and the company's revenues had surpassed $100 million for the first time. By 2003, EA had become the world's leading independent video game publisher. The company generated nearly $2.5 billion in revenue in FY2003, and it owned many of the hottest franchises in the industry including Harry Potter, The Sims, and Madden NFL Football. Moreover, EA had assembled a deep pool of creative talentan important source of competitive advantage. Mattrick served as president of Worldwide Studios, responsible for all software development at the company. During his tenure at EA, Mattrick amassed an impressive track record of churning out best-selling games. The video game industry was a hit-driven business, with a small number of blockbuster titles generating most of the profit. No firm produced more hits than EA. In 1998 the company had six titles that sold more than 1 million copies. Five years later, EA published 22 games that sold in excess of 1 million units. The company's focus on developing blockbuster hits had paid off. EA doubled revenue over the past four years while releasing the same number of titles. Net income rose by 435% during that time. You have worked with the company for many years and now you have been asked to set up and lead a key design studio focused on the Wii platform. You will be closely working together with Ron, Janet, and Karen. Ron has ample experience in the video games industry; he has designed for Playstation and Xbox. Basically a guru for the Xbox, Ron is considered a natural team leader even though designing for the Wii platform is quite a different thing. Janet is the youngest of the three. Quite shy and introverted she likes to focus on difficult Wii design challenges but sees herself not as a leader. Basically, she has never led anything if she could help it. Karen is an all-around programmer who is new to video games. Having experience with many programming languages she should be able to learn fast. She is definitely eager to get this new challenge down fast