John Riccitiello - Life and Career

Life and Career

He received his Bachelors of Science degree from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

He then worked in a variety of consumer product companies including The Clorox Company (Brand Manager), PepsiCo (Group Marketing Director), Häagen-Dazs International (Managing Director), Wilson Sporting Goods (President and Chief Executive Officer), and Sara Lee Corporation (President and Chief Executive Officer, Bakery Division).

From October 1997 through April 2004, Riccitiello became President and Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts. He then left EA and co-founded Elevation Partners, where Riccitiello served as Managing Director. In 2007, Riccitiello was re-hired by EA, this time to serve as CEO. He currently serves on the Board of Councilors of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and on the Board of Directors of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Riccitiello has been credited with diversifying Electronic Arts' business model, and leading the company's shift from consumer packaged goods into the digital delivery of content via console, PC, tablet and mobile devices. A few months after becoming EA’s CEO in 2007, Riccitiello called a meeting of EA’s top executives to address the company’s need to transform itself to survive. Riccitiello described the company’s position at the time: “Our game quality was down, and our costs were high. I could see a fundamental digital transformation coming to our industry that we were not even prepared for. The hardest part was that we were in deep denial.”

In an August, 2011 blog post, Riccitiello spoke publicly about the transformation: “Our quality has risen dramatically. We’ve built an $800m+ digital business while pushing down operating costs ... Now, we are switching from defense to offense. We’re focusing on building our intellectual properties/franchises into year-round business. We’ve established our own platform, Origin, and we continue to grow our digital business."

Earlier in the year, at a commencement address at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, Riccitiello said "we knew it would be hard but we had no idea how hard. We knew the enormous investments would be unsettling to investors … and that the return would be a long way off. Perhaps most painfully – we had to do these three hard things while the press and many financial analysts told us we were crazy – that the cutting we were doing was great, but that the investment in digital was just not a good idea. It proved very hard to hear the negative drumbeat from out there in the public while tacking very hard challenges at work. Like everyone else who has had a long business career, I’ve had first-hand experience with failure – and I’ve had the opportunity to learn and recover from it. Everyone fails. Everyone falls down. Everyone loses a game or gets a bad grade … When it happens, fail well."

However, EA has fallen into hard times, having recently been voted the worst company in America by the Consumerist magazine, beating the likes of Bank of America and AT&T. EA's share price continues to tumble, losing over half its value since January 2012 and people have started to question Riccitiello's competence as CEO. Riccitiello's response was that this state of affairs was of no fault of his own but that of investors 'who did not understand the gaming industry'.