By John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write in Wired that contrary to popular perception, multi-player online games are a good training ground for junior management.
. . . the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.
They write about Stephen Gillett who was hired by Yahoo as a Senior Director of Engineering.
Joi Ito, who’s gone deep into World of Warcraft, talks about how he gets together with VCs to talk shop much like business folk from the previous century (I love saying that) would do deals over a round of golf.
What’s next? Books in the business section titled, How to Level Up Your Character and Influence People.
You might want to check out Marc Prensky’s site, I came across his work when I was doing some research work on recruiting young workers with ‘hip’ enterprise tools. Some interesting stuff about how video games influence kids’ learning and educates ‘us kids’ today as well that are still tinkering with video games 😉
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp
My 7 year-old son showed me a “computer” he constructed out of cardboard today when I got home from work. On it, he had drawn a search interface. The search engine, in his mind, is the primary purpose of a computer.
There were no banner ads.
Ooo that sounds like a perfect business opening “How to Level Up Your Character and Influence People.”