New York Times published a Q&A article with Will Wright about the factors of hiring and managing a development team.  Here’s a sample question relating to Spore:

Q. How do you manage your time?

A. We’ve tried a lot of different things. There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar.

We would also invite one of my lead artists, a guy named Ocean Quigley, to these general creative meetings. He gets very impatient when things go off track and are not relevant to him, and I found that Ocean was like the canary in the coal mine. Whenever the meeting started getting off track, Ocean would usually raise his hand and say something like, “Oh, do you need me in the meeting anymore?’ And then he would try and get out of the meeting. And so, that was the point at which we always knew the meeting had hit diminishing returns, because our canary had put up his hand.

It’s more of a philosophy, you know, we just try to convey to everybody on the team. It’s almost more like you want to encourage everybody to be a hall monitor. “Hey, are we wasting our time here, or not?”

Q&A here