It has been almost impossible in the past year to avoid the media hype about virtual worlds and virtual teams. Virtual worlds such as Second Life have received a lot of press claiming that their existence will revolutionize the way we interact and do business. A number of high-ranked universities, including Harvard, have set up campuses and are conducting classes… Read more →
A new report from Forrester Research is encouraging businesses to consider virtual worlds as a necessary next step in helping collaboration among team members and businesses. Reports such as this strengthen our conviction that, just as the Internet revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate with each other, virtual worlds and the 3D world wide web will soon have the same transformational effects on the way we communicate and collaborate.
Last week I read a report called Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOGs), put out by an organization called Seriosity (condensed report, full report). Their study investigated the lessons that MMOGs might have for leadership in the workplace, with the suggestion that experience in MMOGs or virtual worlds crosses… Read more →
In my last post I suggested that simply copying and pasting the real world into a virtual environment is likely not enough to optimize virtual world collaboration. Sun Microsystems is a company that seems to understand this and is utilizing the company’s virtual world in an interesting way. Rather than make everything a carbon-copy of the real world, Sun is… Read more →
People in organizations have known for a long time that trust is an important antecedent of effective teamwork. So it would make sense for this to hold true not only in face to face groups, but also for virtual teams. This week the Leading Virtually team came across a posting by Bridge the Distance offering help in building trust in… Read more →
I demonstrated Second Life a few days back to an MBA class on e-business. There seemed to be some confusion about what something like Second Life is for or what people can do there, and for that matter, why they would want to. This confusion seems to exist even among businesses that are building a presence in Second Life. Some… Read more →