Are you playing with future entrepreneurs?

Interesting article on Forbes yesterday about how playing video games have shaped or helped entrepreneurs. In the article an entrepreneur named John Hagel, who is currently co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte, starts out by talking about having hired a young employee right out of college. This employee, Stephen Gillett, ended up becoming the CIO for Starbucks and at the time was the youngest CIO in the Fortune 500.

"And Hagel thinks he knows a primary reason for his one-time employee's meteoric rise. Everything that Gillett needed to know, Hagel said, he learned while becoming a guild leader in the popular online game World of Warcraft."

Wow, that is a lot to say that Gillett's guild leading skills was the primary reason for becoming the youngest CIO in the Fortune 500. So Hagel talked about this at a conference for Wharton, one of the country's top business schools. At the Wharton Leadership Conference Hagel said:

"... that Gillett - just like other top players on the massive online multi-player game, with an estimated 8 million participants - reached out independently to build a large team of allies that solved complex problems and developed winning strategies. Guild leaders in World of Warcraft "require a high degree of influence". You have to be able to influence and persuade people - not order them to do things. Ordering people in most of these guilds doesn't get you far."

Again, just incredible to me that he is at a Wharton conference and talking about skills picked up in WoW having this kind of business impact. Now Hagel addressed World of Warcraft and its relevance for today's complicated business environment in a research project and book called The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, where they addressed "how companies re-invent and revive themselves by moving away from secretive, proprietary shops and toward a more open, collaborative business model".

Hagel's point seems to be that American companies need "the edge," where "passionate, change-driven employees collaborate with others on innovations" to succeed in this global business environment. US companies need to get away from simply developing a proprietary product and then trying to defending that advantage and move towards creating broad networks and finding innovation at "the edge" of their businesses with improved teamwork and communication skills.

Hagel, along with his research and book colleague John Seely Brown, also addressed how WoW can promote innovation in an older January 2009 Businessweek article. They address how business executives can improve organizational performance by using WoW approaches.

I wasn't surprised to read that Hagel does have a background in gaming, having worked at Atari in his past. Back to the Forbes article, Hagel talks about the success of software company SAP:

"Hagel thinks the teamwork and communication skills that SAP software designers have been gaining are quite similar to the talents that leaders among the millions of online gamers playing World of Warcraft--people like Starbucks CIO Gillett--have also been acquiring. In addition to the leadership qualities involved with becoming the head of a guild and assembling a problem-solving team from previously independent players, World of Warcraft enthusiasts, conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader. In addition, he said that game players typically customize their own dashboards to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy."

I don't know if I completely agree that the skills picked up from guild leading would be a primary reason for entrepreneurial success. I definitely think you do learn about managing and leading people, resolving conflict, etc etc. But I am more inclined to think that the core of these skills were more innate in these individuals prior to playing the game, thus making it more likely that they would end up becoming guild leaders.

But regardless, I think its pretty incredible that an article like this is on Forbes with a WoW picture and tagline like "Worried that India and China will eat your lunch? Check out World Of Warcraft" as well as the fact that Hagel talked about this at Wharton.

Is our little game becoming more accepted and mainstream in society and in the business world?

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A little bit of stick along with the carrot

The Left Claw has never been a hard core progression guild. We're a guild of people who turned into friends, a group that wants to do decently in terms of downing bosses and seeing what the game has to offer but at the same time is a bit more casual in our approach to raiding.

For last Thursday's raid, Jess was away on vacation or something so wasn't there to run. Knowing this ahead of time, I made the conscious decision that I was going to lead the raid a little more hard core that night. Given that we are in the summer months and with folks off and on, we aren't going to have a ton of time to raid. Thus, when we are raiding, I thought that we could tighten things up a bit more.

Tighten what, you may ask? Well, I mean how fast we clear through to the Lich King. I don't think we have to get militant about raiding, but we could definitely speed things up a bit more. Sometimes the number of consecutive afks and brbs drives me batty. I totally understand that we need them, and some of our folks are dealing with kids. But could we be a bit more efficient with our raiding time? Oh, most definitely.

So as we were zoning in and waiting for the last couple of folks to come in, I said something like :

"We need to clear this shit faster. There will be minimal or consolidated afks tonight. NO phantom afks. There will be no break until after Saurfang, so if you need to go, go now before we start."

Sure folks gave me shit, saying they were grabbing bottles (ewww) or going to grab water before they got in trouble. Despite the joking though, I think folks appreciated it. Yeah, we had afks, but for the most part they were scheduled/announced beforehand (after completing a wing seemed to make sense). And if someone had to go afk some other time, I announced that anyone else that needs to go could go then as well. Consolidated afks! Doooo eeeeet!

Hopefully my raid leading wasn't too annoying. But I will say that we cleared to Sindragosa faster than we ever have before, and I think (or hope) folks appreciated that. We're a more casual guild that is designed more around the carrot. But I think we can bring in a little bit of stick along with the carrot.

On another note, we are still working on good old Lichie-poo as Jess likes to call him. We're at the point now where we're in Phase 3 for varying amounts of time before it all goes to hell in a hand basket. Ugh. Last night we had our best attempts yet, one that went so freakin' close it was exciting to see the progress, yet frustrating to be so close and not get it.

But for you fellow druids, I need some advice. As a tree, what do you do when you get sucked in the Frostmourne? I seem to see and read varying advice on whether healers can just heal Terenas through Soul Rip or whether they must interrupt Soul Rip. The one time I got sucked in, I tried to start out healing then switched to bear to enrage and bash for Soul Rip, but I failed at it. Should I try maiming in kitteh? Do I have to interrupt?

What do you do? Halp!

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Random Thursday

Couple of random funnies to share this Thursday.

This article below really cracked me up. But its a good reminder to try to find the joy or humor in our little game, even if its the bazillionth daily you've done (do it without a tank!), or the 100th time you've done a certain boss. Musical ICC was a good time for us, I should try to come up with something else to shake things up a bit:

Pajama Forest is a really cute webcomic (archived comics here) that has WoW related comics from time to time:

In this pre-expansion slump, folks are taking breaks from the game as well as leaving guilds. It's important I think to communicate this clearly and fairly. Perhaps this breakup letter can teach us a lesson:

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What can we learn from the World Cup?

Are you guys watching the World Cup? Two weeks into it and as always, it's been exciting! I'm super super pleased since both of my teams have made it into the second round. My Korean brothers pulled it out yesterday:

Dae-han-min-guk! And the US made it a bit too close this morning, but finally scored in the 91st minute in injury time.

This means Saturday will be an all day soccer fest for me, with South Korea playing in the morning and the US in the afternoon.

I think we all know that raiding is a team effort. So just to reinforce this point, a couple of ideas on what can we learn from watching these soccer matches:

1. You're a team. No matter how many brilliant, egotistical, overpaid super stars you may have, it really doesn't matter if you can't play as a team. Team chemistry and the desire to work together makes a difference.

2. Communication. The best teams communicate with each other. Even when there are distractions (ahem vuvuzelas), you have to find an effective and constructive way to communicate throughout the mayhem.

3. Sometimes things are beyond your control. Blizzard/server glitches, idiot blind referees (ahem Kouman Coulibaly)... yeah sometimes despite your best effort, things happen beyond your control. Sometimes lady luck is on your side, sometimes it isn't.

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WoW spouses revisited

Last month Jess came out on Pretty in Plate clarifying that he is in fact a he. I think over time a number of readers on his blog, as well as mine, had come to assume he was a she. However, very astute readers of my blog may have noticed that I did slip up a number of times here and refer to Jess as a he. I've also referred to him several times here as my WoW spouse, a subject I blogged about a while back.

But now that the word is officially out on Jess and there has been some time for this shocking news to settle (heh), I feel that I can safely and freely blog about this whole notion of Jess as my WoW spouse. Let me first share the story of how I first met Jess, a story that most everyone in the guild has heard already.

I came into The Left Claw in March of 2007, brought in by our old friend Adamas. When I was brought into the guild, Jess was online and Adamas introduced me to Jess. Now here's where it gets funny. The noob in me never even considered that a guy would play a female toon. Never. So here I am meeting someone named Jessika and I got so incredibly excited with the notion of meeting another female in the game, that I went a little crazy. The whisper went a little like this:

"OMG!!! Jessika!!! It's so nice to meet you! I'm so glad to meet another female player because I am female and /squee! Let's be best friends and hold hands and skip along and talk butterflies and glitter and cupcakes and rainbows!!!"

Ok it didn't go exactly like that. But that was the gist. There was a slight pause, during which I was wondering whether this girl was thinking I was some crazy person. Then Jess responds with something like:

"Well since you've been honest with me, I have to be honest with you. I'm a guy."

I was shocked. What? A guy playing a female warrior named Jessika? /boggle. It really cracks me up today that I never even considered the possibility that a guy could play female toons. Now given that Jess is much more private than I am, I felt that this wasn't something that was for me to share with the rest of the guild.

For a long time folks like Daihiro and Adamas also had no clue and just continued with the assumption that Jess was a she. It was kind of funny and cute when Adamas would call Jess "Hon" from time to time. All was revealed of course, when Blizz implemented the in game voice feature (we didn't use vent back then).

Sometimes I wonder how Jess and I came to become WoW hubby and WoW wife. Did our stereotypical roles of male tank and female healer have anything to do with it? Did I feel more "wife-ly" healing him? Did Jess feel more "hubby-ly" protecting me from angry scary mobs? Did our personal backgrounds and personalities just somehow mesh? Was it somehow a combination of multiple factors?

I am very intrigued though with the notion of whether we would have become WoW hubby and WoW wife if the two of us had somehow chosen two dps toons as our mains. I'm not sure. How did our roles tanking/healing 5 mans and 2 manning multiple group quests affect our relationship? Hmmm.

So yes, we play the stereotypical male tank - female healer roles. But here's some insight in how it's gotten to the WoW hubby and wife relationship. The two of us probably bicker over vent a bit. I can say something or in a certain way to Jess that I would never ever say to anyone else in the guild. And even if we bicker and disagree, I don't question whether it will somehow negatively affect the relationship. It's kind of understood that we'll fight and disagree, then we'll get over it, just like any other husband and wife.

In the beginning, I think guildies wondered and perhaps worried when we were bickering. As Jess is the GM of the guild, and I am his WoW wife, the joke in the guild when we fight is for the guildies to say something like Vel once did:

"I get a little sad inside when mommy and daddy fight."

Haha. The kids get sad when mom and dad fight. :) As Jess' WoW wife, I definitely question his decisions and give him crap more than anyone else. And let's just be clear, as any wife or girlfriend is, I am always right. Always. Even when I'm wrong. And as Shat clarified for us the other night:

"You shut your mouth when you're talking to K!"

Since Jess is also our de facto raid leader, its interesting that when Jess isn't there for a raid, the responsibility is sort of placed on me. After one of these nights, Darc thanked me for leading the raid, to which I had to clarify:

"Darc, you realize that even when Jess is here, I am really the one leading things around here, right?"

Though as outspoken and argumentative as I can be, there is a part of me that does play a more supportive "wife-ly" role. (I swear! It's true!) Now Jess and I whisper back and forth a lot during raids. What is interesting is that if I think that something should be changed in terms of raid strategy, I more often that not do not say it myself on vent. I whisper Jess, who then takes my always brilliant ideas and suggestions to the raid.

Now if Jess somehow mistakenly refuses to listen to me, I may say something myself on vent. But I tend to always give Jess the opportunity to consider it and present it himself. I wondered why I did this when clearly I am not some shy wallflower who is afraid to let her views known. I asked Jess the other week what he thought. Jess thought that it was maybe some subconscious wife-ly way to kind of support WoW hubby. Hmmm. Perhaps.

Our relationship in game is probably similar to real life spouses who play together in game. Except that I don't have the advantage of throwing something across the room at Jess when he screws up. Such a shame, such a shame.

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I'll stick to my Trader Joe's snacks

I came across this article on Kotaku about Gamer Grub, a snack specifically marketed towards us gamers with tag lines like "no keyboard crumbs" and "no greasy fingers".

What cracks me up is that it is marketed as a "performance snack". They even have a specific science of gamer grub section on their website with info such as:

"Gamer Grub is a great tasting snack mix packed with select vitamins and neurotransmitters supporting fast cognitive performance. Gamer Grub is scientifically formulated to power your core gaming systems for maximum gaming performance."

Then vitamins and minerals in the snack are listed, specifically listing how they affect gamer performance such as vitamin A helping nerve impulses in the eyes and L-glutamic acid affecting nerve cell data input and output.

None of the four flavors (Pizza, PB&J, BBQ, S'mores) really appeals to me, and honestly this marketing pitch of this as a "performance snack" is a bit much to me. The whole vitamins and neurotransmitters in the snack helping your gaming by keeping you focused and quick makes me roll my eyes.

As I've previously blogged about, I'll stick to my Trader Joe's snacks, thanks. My latest kicks?

The Tofutti sounds kinda gross but its so yummy, I swear! I've come to call it frozen trickery because it really tastes like a real ice cream sandwich.

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Is he a pally or a warrior?

For those of you who need a stylish way to carry your axe:

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What do tanks do again?

For a while now, I have been more likely to not do my daily heroic than do it. I just can't get myself to do those same heroics day after day. Especially when they are so easy sauce now. Now I think I've read about others doing their daily with fishing gear on or half nekkid or something to make it at least a bit of a challenge. But last week I was involved in an interesting daily run that could be another way for us to keep these daily heroics somewhat interesting.

We ran the daily without a tank. Shat, an elemental shammy served as our tank with two mages and a ret pally as dps. It was quite amusing, and a nice change of pace to be kept on my toes as the healer in this group. Huh? I actually have to pay attention in this daily? I can't just throw a hot and watch TV? It probably helped that with an ele shammy and two mages, we were super bursty. Well, we went through heroic Halls of Lightning just fine. When we were done, I asked:

"What the heck do we need tanks for again?"

Jess got his white ponytail in a little bit of a tizzy at this comment.

Anyways, last week was a slow week in raiding. We had some absences, including Jess. So when we were going through the lower spire, folks wanted to swap in some other toons. With the alts and the absences, it required yours truly to tank. Now here's the issue whenever I have to tank. I kind of know on a high level what goes on and what I'm supposed to do, but not really at the detailed level. I think what I asked before Deathwhisper was something to the effect of:

"So there's like adherents and other things, right? And when they like come back, its like really bad right? What are the other things called again?"

I also totally wiped a Blood Princes attempt because I was supposed to be on the blue balls and I wasn't very proactive at running around the room to gather all of them up. Lazy bear is lazy.

Going from healing encounters to tanking them makes them almost completely new encounters. I'm just so very used to staying out of the bad stuff and focusing on my grid boxes. I tend not to pay any attention to Jess' lectures that specify specific mobs or kill order or anything of that sort. It's different feeling so confident in healing something vs not knowing what the heck I'm doing tanking it.

All of this means that when I have to tank or quasi lead a raid, its gets sort of comical. I think we were on Sindragosa and during the middle of the encounter, I call out for someone to help take care of the orbs. Folks were like orbs? There are orbs here? I think some smart ass also called for more dps on the green ooze and the blazing skeleton. Har har guys, har har. :p

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