Agility and Innovation Seem Related to Leadership Practices

As I look at the study, it seems to me that agility and innovation is the pattern most often exhibited in MMOGs, and rigidity and use of best practices is the pattern most often exhibited by corporations. I think this is related to the way leadership happens in these two areas.

Activity in MMOGs is agile because the group breaks up their journey toward their common goal into many smaller missions; each one moves them in the direction they want to go. These missions require different skill sets, so they provide opportunities for leadership to be exercised by many different players.

MMOG leaders are also encouraged to try innovative approaches to problems they face because they are clearly rewarded for their successes and not permanently penalized for their failures. And since there are many missions, the risk involved in any one mission is not so great that its failure would derail the group's whole journey.

It seems fair to say that rigidity is often the behavior exhibited by corporations because they pursue much larger missions with smaller groups of leaders who have fixed sets of skills. And since the consequences of failure on these much larger missions are severe, there is a lot less willingness to try innovative approaches. Instead, corporate leaders try to avoid blame and cope with risk by following pre-defined and officially approved best practices (whether those practices are actually effective or not).

So, if business operations increasingly take place among people who are widely distributed in different locations around the world, and if we live in economic and political environments that are increasingly fast-paced and fiercely competitive, what can we learn from massively multiplayer online games? Do MMOGs offer us glimpses of how we'll all be working in a few years?