Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders

Online Gamers Are Good Collaborators

Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on August 2, 2007

If you would like to learn how players of online video games are preparing themselves to be business leaders in the future, this interview is for you.

Our guest today is Eric Lesser who is an Associate Partner at IBM’s Institute for Business Value. He is a co-author of Leadership in a Distributed World: Lessons From Online Gaming.Your kids are not wasting their time when playing Massive Multiplayer Games online. To the contrary, they are learning how to lead collaborative teams of workers from all over the globe. In the future they will be the ones most skilled at identifying the best talent available for a project, organizing an effective team, and leading it to a successful completion of its mission.

Like the telephone is a routine business tool today, online collaboration shall become one in the future. It will enable project managers to assemble the best-of-breed talent from anywhere in the world. Team skills will not be limited to those held by people in your office, but could be assembled from individuals in remote offices, and even outside of your own company.

People, like me, with some gray hair are going to have a challenge adapting. In contrast, younger workers who were addictive players of games like World of Warcraft are going to find online worker collaboration to be a natural way of accomplishing goals.

IBM surveyed some of their own employees to determine the relative rankings of leadership skills in a conventional setting as compared to an online one. They found that the rankings were different. For example, online collaborators put learning from their mistakes and those of others as most important. In contrast, they regarded creating a compelling vision as the most important skill in a conventional office.

Length: This audio interview is covered in about 22 minutes.