United Gamer Online (UGO)

by Mike Smith
Think you need expensive MBAs to rise to the top of one of the world's biggest businesses? Don't tell Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett.
Gillett does actually have an MBA (from San Francisco State, as it happens), but according to a report in Forbes, one expert credits Gillett's time as a guild leader in leading massively-multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for his "meteoric rise."

According to Gillett's former boss John Hagel III, speaking at a leadership conference, successful guild leaders need "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."

Aside from their leadership skills, Warcraft enthusiasts, Hagel told Forbes, "conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader." They'll also "customize their own game interfaces to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy" -- all key skills for any management professional, as our friendly office MBA tells us.

How strongly does Gillett believe in the ties between Warcraft and business? Strong enough to warrant a blog dedicated to the subject, run by the CIO himself. And it doesn't take long to see how running a guild and running a business are, in some ways, one and the same.

"What makes a community successful, makes a guild successful," Gillett writes. "If a guildie [sic] loyalty resides in any one individual in the guild, then you have future stress fractures waiting to happen. The goal is to have the loyalty reside with the guild and not specifically to any one person in it." Amen to that.

So there you have it, kids: next time your parents say you're playing too many games, tell them you're not blowing off your homework, you're honing your management skills. Good luck with that.