Leadership in the Old World and the New

Leadership in the corporate world is restricted to a relatively small group of people who are identified, mentored and promoted by company senior management. Leadership in the MMOG world is distributed over a wide group of people who work to increase their own skill levels and who are promoted by consensus in the groups they are a part of.

In the corporate world (as the saying goes) it's often not what you know but who you know. In other words, people get a chance for leadership only if they are noticed by senior management. How many subordinates can a senior manager really notice (and how much dysfunctional brownnosing is motivated by the urgent desire of subordinates to be noticed?)? And since senior management is just a small number of people, the total number of people in a company who can be noticed and get a chance to lead is also small. Lots of qualified people are never noticed.

In MMOGs, players skills and aptitudes are constantly measured and made transparently clear to everyone; all players can see the skill levels and success rates of all other players they interact with. Therefore, because everyone can see everyone else's qualifications for leadership, the number of people who can become leaders is large; all qualified people get noticed.

Also, in corporations, once people are promoted into leadership positions, expectations are that those are permanent promotions (unless they screw up and get fired). People get promoted because they may have skills that are important at the time of their promotion, but then they stay in those positions even as situations change and the skills that originally got them promoted are no longer relevant. Hopefully these people can learn new skills, or the company suffers.

In MMOGs the expectation is that promotions into leadership will be temporary. Players get promoted depending on the needs of the group at a given time for a given situation. As situations change, new people are promoted to lead the group because they possess high levels of the skills called for in those new situations. This way the group gets the benefit of having the most highly qualified people lead them in each situation.