Op-Ed: Learn Leadership, play games online - New business management revelation

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Those familiar with management-speak will recognize some of the terminology which has created the impoverished mindsets we all admire so much.

While reading, remember that people are actually paid to produce this stuff.

The Times Online has somehow captured this rhetorical rhapsody:

An eight-month study on leadership in games, commissioned by IBM, found that online games can be informal but realistic simulators for contemporary leadership training, helping to teach “soft” aspects of leadership. For example, the pace of games means that leaders often have to make hundreds of strategic decisions in an hour of game play. The relatively mild consequences of failure allow players to test out a variety of leadership techniques and the temporary nature of many roles in games provides people who are followers in the real world with opportunities to lead.

Some might say that being awake occasionally could produce results remarkably similar to this exotic mental state.

Maybe even the odd attack of actual consciousness could contribute to some form of vague perception.

Nah…This is business management we're talking about.

The original article was sourced from the Harvard Business Review, which is a subscriber service, with a few free articles of which this study apparently isn’t one.

As business thinking savagely embraces the 1980s, we may pause for a moment to marvel at the bold approach to leadership. Consider the reckless daring involved in this approach: “Try something, it might work”.

I can see Hannibal, Nelson, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan earnestly trundling to their local business college to learn this stuff.

Leadership, ironically, is one of the keystones of management science.

It once meant actual charisma, the ability to inspire people to follow.

In management it’s become one of the chunks of ritual dribble which involves proving your leadership by telling an interview panel what a great leader you are, and how you organized a project to find out what your company sells.

The revelations don’t end there, though. This is a very short article, and I’ve had to grab quite a bit of it to show the true magnificence of the concept.

Maybe the Times Online decided to stick to the really hard-hitting stuff. Or maybe they have some pride:

Online players are rewarded for their efforts immediately after a quest is completed, creating a strong connection between effort and reward. Companies might devise schemes – instead of an end-of-year bonus, for example – to reward people for their contributions as soon as a project is completed. Synthetic currencies have tremendous value to game players: the fact that people care a great deal about virtual gains and losses could change business incentives. In gaming, data about individual players is constantly updated and on display to the entire team, allowing leaders to quickly locate players with useful skills and weapons.

Rewards, bonuses, analogies, currencies, incentives, gains and losses… You can even do performance reviews of your team, so you have someone to complain about afterwards, a built in scapegoat or so. Makes you wonder how business trainers stumbled on the idea, doesn’t it?

Put another way:

“Fetch”.