Amazing article in the Harvard Business Review on MMORPG Leadership as applicable to business

I just finished reading a great article in the HBR about leadership in online games. The authors were three business professors from Stanford, MIT's Sloan and NC Jenkins.

For me there were many specific interesting points:

• These researchers were deeply impressed by the speed and the intensity of the decision making in games.

• They were shocked to discover how fluidly that leadership is a dynamic role that moves from person to person rather than being statically attached to an individual

• That due to the game structures themselves the gaols of the group are far better framed than is normal in business and thus online games are more similar to warfare than modern business

• That guild and party leaders due to the tools, data, plug ins and so on that is prevalent in the industry but especially wow with the lua/xml client architecture that these leaders have the deep real-time metrics and dash boards that real business executives dream only of

• Due the metrics & tools, groups of gamers are very clean meritocracies as compared to many other organizational groups.

• That people spend hundreds of hours voluntarily, no scratch that, they pay to accomplish these group goals without any formal commitments - thus there is an extreme premium on leaders that are able to create and sustain consensus

• Finally that we should probably be looking at how to apply game structures inside of business organizations to increase productivity.

Cheers, -Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal