There’s an enjoyably quirky article about multiplayer online games in the latest Harvard Business Review. The authors, professors at Stanford, MIT and North Carolina State, report on whether the likes of World of Warcraft and Everquest can teach real managers any leadership lessons. Tentatively, they conclude that the way players - often complete strangers - operate in teams during these games can be instructive:

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.

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Earlier this month, I asked readers for their experiences of professional networking websites. Having used these responses to shape my questioning of bosses at LinkedIn and Xing, two huge players in this field, I’ve come to the conclusion that such sites can benefit users in two major ways - as long as they avoid two big pitfalls.

Below is a summary of these pros and cons, with input from Lars Hinrichs, the founder and chief executive of Xing, and Kevin Eyres, the European managing director of LinkedIn (as Mr Eyres is based in London, I was also able to conduct a 9-minute audio interview with him). It’s a long post but please bear with me!

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When Jérôme Kerviel was named as the alleged rogue trader at Société Générale, journalists immediately trawled social networking websites in search of facts about his career and personal life.  But in spite of the risk of such (perfectly legitimate) intrusion, hordes of business people are still willing to lay out details of their lives on sites such as LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook. Why?

Given that these are predominantly smart, forward-thinking people, I can only assume that the benefits of membership outweigh the privacy risks. Over the next week or so, I’d like to try to quantify and analyse some of these benefits. I’m particularly intrigued by the potential for conflict between the trend for ‘Brand Me’ self-promotion and the ‘keep your head down’ discretion expected by more traditional employers.

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