March 12, 2006

i thought so…

2 Comments

OK, so why did everybody’s favo­rite busi­ness visio­nary, Joi Ito pretty much give up blog­ging, to play video games ins­tead (“World of Warc­raft”, to be spe­ci­fic)?
Today he drop­ped a hint:

The struc­ture and the orga­ni­za­tion requi­red to com­plete mis­sions or quests in WoW adds a great deal of focus and com­ple­xity to the com­mu­nity com­pa­red to a chat room and the com­mu­ni­ca­tions and mana­ge­ment begins to feel much more like colla­bo­ra­tion in a work envi­ron­ment. I think that the ever-evolving user inter­face and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools that we are deve­lo­ping might impact the future of mana­ge­ment in the real world. My fee­ling is that what we are doing in WoW repre­sents in many ways the future of real time colla­bo­ra­tive teams and lea­dership in an inc­rea­singly ad hoc, always-on, diver­sity intense and real-time environment.

Good ol’ Joi. Never a dull moment with him around.
[UPDATE:] Daniel Ter­di­man from CNET pipes in:

But Ito’s point is that emplo­yers would do well to see that they can keep emplo­yees happy by being res­pect­ful to them and encou­ra­ging an envi­ron­ment in which peo­ple work together and chase com­mon goals without autoc­ra­tic lea­ders belli­ge­rently laying down arbi­trary ground rules.
At least, he explai­ned, that method isn’t very suc­cess­ful in WoW, where guild lea­ders trying to orga­nize 30 or 40 peo­ple for raids have to recog­nize that if their char­ges aren’t happy, they’ll just leave.

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2 Responses to “i thought so…”

  1. Dannie Jost says:
    March 13, 2006 at 9:20 AM

    Yes. Why does it seem obvious? Ins­pi­red by Joi’s reports from the depths of WoW, I asked my geek son if he plays WoW,and his ans­wer was that no, but kno­wing me he would sus­pect that I do play it, but kno­wing my machi­nes he knows that I do not.
    I am rather curious as to what Joi’s con­tri­bu­tion to mana­ge­ment will be follo­wing his WoW foray.

  2. cathy says:
    March 13, 2006 at 9:16 PM

    I sup­pose in busi­ness speak it might work something like this article poses on ‘dis­tri­bu­ted mana­ge­ment’ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/01/01/8368117/index.htm
    And although I don’t play WoW I would like to, and my 10 year old is very inte­res­ted although not tech­ni­cally old enough (not that it ever stop­ped him in the past)
    Just about anything that is hei­rarchi­cal could now become ‘dis­tri­bu­ted’ as it were, or a hybrid of the two.