Whew, I'm pooped, so I'm not gonna get too much into detail on how the lecture went until tomorrow.
What I can say though, is that I absoloutly loved it! Reggie was funny, personable, and his presentation had a very strong focus on what he personally thinks, makes a leader. He labled them under the 7 principles of leadership.
Without going into toooo much detail (it was around an hour long!), some really cool moments in the lecture:
1: Yes, he talked about Nintendo a lot! Specfically, he talked about getting Wii sports bundled with the Wii, Nintendo's hanafuda history, how he once chatted with the person who engineered the NES to ask him its main goal (it was to play a good game of Donkey Kong of course :P), etc. In particular, he acknowledged that the Wii U was a failure pretty bluntly, but he called it a "failure foward" since it led to the Switch. Another funny ancedote: He seemed to talk to the Japanese side of Nintendo a LOT, more than just bussiness reasons. Apparently, they usually called him Reggie-san lol.
2. A particularly touching moment, is that he had a short segment about Iwata. The way he talked about him, they really seemed like close, personal friends. I also found it interesting that during the wii sports segment, he specfically mentioned that Iwata disagreed with bundling Wii Sports in the US at first! He described Iwata as a mentor figure, and that he learned the value of "silence" in bussiness from him, something he didn't see often in the more western bussinesses he worked at. Im only paraphrasing it here, but it was really interesting! Here's a picture of the Iwata slide, he even mentioned what the text behind him meant! It was related to Inovation I believe:
3. Reggie wasn't some wooden, boring presenting here. Dude seemed to LOVE the audience, and interacted with it a lot. For example, he immeditly says "Wow, I love you too!" when the audience goes apeshit at his apperance. He was cracking jokes, responded to a dude that literally held up his launch Wii over his head, and in general was really receptive to us all. A really great one in particular, was when he straight up admited that the Wii U was a failure, but then added that it was a "a failure foward", one that led to... well, he gestured us, and the whole auditorum yells "THE NINTENDO SWITCH!!!". We had a really electric crowd here!
4. He went into a lot of detail into his 7 principles of leadership. It wasn't all just Nintendo. For example he talked about his time at P&E, and his time at Panda Express too! It seems like for Panda Express in particular, hes responsible for the kitchen design or something like that!
5. Something that made me really happy is that he had a strong focus on the importance of diversity. Not only did he seem to lambest organizations / companies that employ too many of the same kinds of people, he emphaized the importance of having a workforce with a variety of races, genders, and sexual orientations. He had a neat slide with Miis for this! Even better, the final question asked him about getting more women to work in the video game industry, and he went further and talked about how apparently, Nintendo of America had internal diversity programs that supported groups of women and LGTB people at the company!
6. The questions got pretty interesting. Probably the highlight was someone asking about the Blizzard Hong Kong situation! Unfortunately, he stops just short of condeming China themselves (saying that its a very different market), but he saved it by praising the consumers response to Blizzard-Activision, and seemed to make it clear that he think they screwed up. However, he didn't view it as an issue of intregrity of leadership in this case, as he had a pretty specfic defination for it in the lecture.
7. Yes, someone asked about Mother 3, which caused a roar of laughter, and Reggie joking saying he thought he'd FINALLY escaped it until now rofl!
8. Possibly the craziest background to a question: So a guy talked about how to deal with feedback. Seems normal right? Well, he also talked about his apsirations, and this dude dreamed big.. his goal is to become the CEO of the Pokemon company in 38 years o______O. That's... one hell of a goal so to speak, and he mentioned something about trending on twitter and google, and he had people sign a clock. Not gonna lie, it was pretty odd, but Reggie reacted to it awesomely, saying that he'll be sure to remember this moment, and he looks foward to seeing him as the new CEO rofl.
9. Retro actually got brought up a tiny bit! Someone asked him about how Nintendo decides release dates for their close partners like the Pokemon Company. He said that that its a back and forth process, and mentioned that Retro Studios seems to have control over their release dates in a similar manner to the Pokemon Company. Not sure how reliable that is, I may have misheard it.
Overall, I had a great time, and the lecture was surprisngly very inspirational. Reggie had a big focus on learning from failure in particular. He still had a bit of the PR sheen, but he certainly felt more down to earth than say, he has in interviews of the past. Even stuff before and after the lecutre was cool! People gathered and played a lot of Smash and Pokemon Go while waiting, and Reggie even did a meet and greet with EVERYONE! Yeah seriously, I thought he was gonna leave at 9 PM like he was supposed to, but I think I heard him yell that he was gonna do it for everyone, and he stayed almost an HOUR after he was supposed to to make sure everyone got a selfie with him!
Yep... that's right, I got to shake hands with the Regginator himself, and got a picture taken with him! To make it extra sentimental, I actually did it with my N3DS open. Specfically, it was open on the Pokemon team I used to get 1st place in the recent Ultra Final Competition in Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, which Reggie seemed to think was a cool idea!
Note that I paraprhased a LOT of this stuff. Thankfully, Cornell mentioned on their twitter that they will be releasing a video of the whole lecture on the internet sometime soon. as they had cameras everywhere for it! Theres so many cool details and fun questions that I just don't have the energy to type out now (I have to get up really early for class tomorrow). But yeah, I had a freaking blast, todaty was an unforgetable day!
