Leadership & Greedy Goblin

Gevlon, the greedy goblin has recently posted a series on "Leadership: The induced magic". As part of his series, he claims that the key to success is asocial behavior with peers. With all due respect, I call cough b&llsh!t cough.

According to HR World's article on Leadership Qualities, "Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.".  A leader must be able to communicate his or her vision in terms that cause followers to buy into it. He or she must communicate clearly and passionately, as passion is contagious.

Based on this, Gevlon fits the definition of a good leader.  In my opinion, his success is based far more on social factors than he would be comfortable with.  He appeals to the elitist in us.  He is visibly successful.  He collects others to share his vision.  He expects patients for new players, especially tanks and healers; they can't practice on a dummy like DPS. They must get into the action to get better. They will be better (sound advice for any guild).  There is a clear mechanism to call out and correct mistakes. He has a clear set of social rules (similar in many regards to some effective work environments)

Yet even Gevlon has his failures.  His ganking project first started with an objective that "M&S - even in huge numbers - can be defeated, since they are a class, but not a group"; and "Their help each other idea is a lie.".  Instead, he gave up.  It happens.  He could not prove his viewpoint to his own satisfaction let alone to anyone else's, and moved on to more profitable grounds.  His conclusion that successful PVP MMO's can not be made is dubious. There is the huge success of Electronic Sports, and I would hesitate to call EVE a niche market.

I am incurably more social than Gevlon.  From each according to ability; to each according to need.  Family groups work in this manner.  Small teams do too.

P.s I thank Blizzard for the opportunity to spend this evening writing this post rather than playing WoW, due to the abundant notice that we had for Oceanic servers going down. Would it really kill you to give us more than 7 hours notice when you are changing the 'scheduled' downtime?

Select Realm 24 Hour Maintenance - 7/20   07/19/2010 03:32:13 PM PDT
The realms listed below will be undergoing a 24 hour extended maintenance to prepare them for the upcoming expansion. They’ll be brought down tonight at 12:01 AM PDT, July 20 and will remain down until approximately 12:01 AM PDT, July 21.  All realms not listed below will undergo their Tuesday maintenance on July 20, at 1:00 AM PDT, and be down until approximately 7:00 AM PDT.