Leadership’s Online Labs

Tomorrow’s business landscape could well be alien territory for today’s business leaders. At many companies, important decision making will be distributed throughout the organization to enable people to respond rapidly to change. A lot of work will be done by global teams—partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority—that are assembled for a single project and then disbanded. Collaboration within these geographically diverse groups will, by necessity, occur mainly through digital rather than face-to-face interaction.

What on earth will leadership look like in such a world—a world whose features have already begun to transform business?

Suspend your skepticism for a moment when we say that the answers may be found among the exploding space stations, grotesque monsters, and spiky-armored warriors of games such as Eve Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. Despite their fantasy settings, these online play worlds—sometimes given the infelicitous moniker MMORPGs (for “massively multiplayer online role-playing games”)—in many ways resemble the coming environment we have described and thus open a window onto the future of real-world business leadership.

True, leading 25 guild members in a six-hour raid on Illidan the Betrayer’s temple fortress is hardly the same as running a complex global organization. For starters, the stakes are just a bit higher in business. But don’t dismiss online games as mere play. The best ones differ from traditional video games as much as universities do from one-room schoolhouses. In fact, these enterprises are actually sprawling online communities in which thousands of players collaborate with and compete against one another in real time within a visually three-dimensional virtual world—one that persists and evolves even while a player is away.

The organizational and strategic challenges facing players who serve as game leaders are familiar ones: recruiting, assessing,...