3pointD.com

Meet the new boss

Good news, all you obssessively grinding World of Warcraft addicts: “Success as a business leader may depend on skills as a gamer,” according to Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research at the IBM Research Center in Almaden, California. IBM has just done a study with Seriosity (one of the cooler companies at the virtual goods summit) which found “significant parallels between online gaming and the future of work,” according to a press release. “Today’s gamers are learning collaboration, self-organization, risk-taking, openness, influence, and how to earn incentives linked to performance and be flexible in the way they communicate.” That’s a lot better than the hand-eye coordination that most people think as the limit of what games have to teach. More below.

Seriosity teamed up with IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook to study the dynamics of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMPORG) which can involve tens of thousands of participants who need to work closely together to achieve certain objectives. By observing how people collaborate and communicate to complete tasks in these virtual communities, key lessons were learned that readily apply to the business world. One of the most important features observed is how online environments allow leaders and managers, as well as anyone with good ideas, to collaborate in organizations that are distributed, global, hyper-competitive and virtual.

As businesses look to virtual worlds to build leaders and cultivate/retain top talent, key features of MMPORG/online gaming environments emerge including:

• Incentive structures that motivate workers immediately and longer term
• Virtual economies that create a marketplace for information and
collaboration
• Transparency of performance and capabilities
• Recognition for achievements
• Visibility into networks of communication across an organization