Playing, learning, growing …

Since October last year I am playing Atlantica, one of those MMPORGs which I think is similar to WOW ( I guess since I don’t know WOW yet ), but this one is free to play. I am fascinated by the real smart reward & reputation system of this game and how it keeps your motivation on a high level and thus keeps you going.

You level-up based on your experience and of course the higher you get the more experience you need to level-up. On a higher level you gain only little experience by fighting low level monsters, thus you have to deal with the difficult ones to grow your experience. At the beginning of a typical quest you just have to fight one party of monsters, occaisonally you might run into a second or third party in parallel if this place is very crowded. Later in the quest you are forced to enter those called shadow dungeons where it is almost guaranteed that you have to fight two or three parties in parallel. If you are not strong enough at that time you might decide to collaborate with other players and form parties yourself. Fighting in a team is rewarded by gaining extra experience points; basically experience made by one of your team members contributes to your experience growth as well.
I love this concept since it simply pays back to collaborate and get in touch with other players to accomplish missions. This "shared experience" gaining has given birth to what is called LDP in the game ( "Long Distance Parties" ): these are parties of player who are actually strong enough and don’t need to fight in parties, they just form one to boost their experience growth. Or if someone isn’t fighting currently he joins the party of someone else just to keep experience points coming in.
Atlantica also has a mentor concept and often a mentee joins the party of his mentor who typically is on a much higher level to profit by his experience growth.

As I said already: on a higher experience level you gain little experience points when fighting low level monsters. But sometimes you have to do it simply to gain important items or money. This then is a typical trade off you also have to make in real life sometimes: money versus experience, dollars versus skill improvement, learning and excitement. In other words: sometimes you have to do the boring stuff to earn money instead of doing "exciting projects" to grow your skills.
In that sense it is amazing how close such a game matches with reality. One blog article is actually not sufficient to describe all aspects of it, one could write an entire book about it. And even I play it almost a year already ( and have reached level 79, 120 is the maximum currently ) there are still new aspects of that reward and reputation system I learn from my guild buddies or other friends each day. It must have taken the developer of that game years to come up with a clever and complex system like that.

Let me simply list a few more features of the game I have not mentioned so far which also play a role for your "career" and "business" in Atllantica as well:

• Like in real life money plays a role as well.
• You can carry it with you or keep it on your bank account. In the first case you risk some loss when loosing a fight against an opponent.
• You get some interest rates for money you keep on the bank, but you have to pay for transactions ( deposit or withdrawel )
• You get money through fighting
• or crafting items and selling on the market
• or exchanging books and selling on the market
• You learn extra ( magic ) skills through books
• You can boost your intelligence, dexterity and other attributes in several ways, e.g. also through getting equipement and weapons. You can craft those on your own, buy it on the market, get it during a battle, upgrade it. To craft you need to have an appropriate crafting skill and you have to buy or collect material. You can also learn crafting skills from other players. The higher your level is the higher level equipment you need, which of course gets more and more expensive, thus you need more and more money.

In some sense this reward & reputation system mirrors real life to a great extent. In some sense I wished the reward & reputation system in large companies would work the same way: e.g.

• a straight and objective experience measurement system. No "self-certifications" any more, you get experience points right away after you have accomplished something, not once a year based on some fuzzy rating delivered by your boss which might be more based on statistical or political aspects than anything else,
• a reward for team play and mentoring
• a permanent growing of your skills by ensuring your future missions ( e.g. projects ) fit to your current skill level in a way that they ask you to do a little more than you have done before; that’s what a healthy growth is all about: the "little more" over time.
• earning money or some form of virtual credits you can use for future projects

This motivation mechanism in those games actually is that efficient that it can become dangerous. In the recent "bild der wissenschaft" magazine there has been an article about pathological gambling, a new disease of modern societies. WOW is mentioned as THE example of a dangerous game making people addicted and disabling them to survive in real life. MMPORGs are drugs for those people who use it to escape their real life, even to an extent where it becomes pretty dangerous for them: they loose their jobs or stop finding a new one, they even forget to eat and sleep.
Used in the right dosage however those games can provide a great experience. I know, reality is not a game. And of course we do not fight monsters, instead we try to help our customers and sell our solutions. But wait a minute, all the obstacles getting into our way – technical defects, plan changes, issues, change requests, budget cuts, team conflicts, politics, conflicting stakeholder interests – aren’t those like monsters in those games lurking at every corner waiting for us to get them out of our way ? What else can we learn form games like Atlantica for our corporate culture and the way we do our business ? Probably more than we initially thought when we said: "Hey, that is just a silly game !"

Intelligent people are bad

Yesterday I finished reading "Lean Brain Management" by Gunter Dueck.  A book about the future which already has begun. A future we either might not want to live in if we don’t change what we are today, or a future which will change us into some(one)thing different. From the very last sentence of the book I conclude that even the author does not want to live in that world he is describing.

Two key messages from the book:

Let’s produce more fakes. They are cheaper to make and usually better than the orignal. We don’t need intelligent people anymore. We put all the intelligence into our business processes and systems.

My friend and his family visited us on Saturday. His kids are the best example: they definitely prefer some artificial food over any what my wife and I would call real food. Once my wife made mashed potatoes out of potatoes, you know, the real stuff with milk added where you really can taste the real potatoes in it. They didn’t like it. They are used to the artificial mashed potatoes you can buy in the super market, this yellow powder to which you add some water and then you get what is sold as mashed potatoes. A mashed potatoes fake. Everyone can prepare it, and obviously ( for most people ) it is even better than what you could produce on your own with real ingredients and a lot of effort. Fakes are the future !

And fakes are easy to produce. The procedure printed on the back of the package is easy to follow, a four-year-old could do it: put the powder in a bowl, add water, stir, done, enjoy. Simple steps, no training is needed to execute those. This principle needs to be applied to our entire life and to the business of every company. Business processes are designed in such a smart way that no smart people are needed anymore, except the few who would design those business processes and those intelligent systems behind. We have to achieve the ultimate level of specialism.

We don’t need IT architects anymore who know the entire portfolio of our and partners and competitors products. In the future you might become an expert how to install DB/2 version 9.5 on an AIX 6.1 machine. That’s it. Your training will take 4 hours and then you ( or everyone else ) can do the job. We don’t need skilled software developer who “speak” a lot of programming languages and can do software design as well, and testing and documentation of course. In the future programming is not needed anyway, you just sick a view prepared components together and that’s it. Or you become the expert for “for”-loops in Perl. Whenever a “for”-loop is needed somewhere in some perl code they call you. We don’t need project manager anymore who need month and years of training and expertise. We might not do projects anyway anymore, but if we do you might be the expert on how to fill out a change request and they will call you into the project if a change request needs to be filled out.

Intelligent people are bad. They make things complicated and cost a lot of money. To be competitive we have to get rid of them.

I don’t know whether Gunter Dueck has written a book about SOA without knowing it. At least I can not recall that I have seen that acronym anywhere in the book. Wouldn’t SOA be the perfect platform to achieve Lean Brain Management (LBM) ? The more we take out those steps in a business process requiring human intervention, or the more we simplify those, the closer we get to the LBM world. And if we built all smarts into the business process like services disocvering each other automatically and connecting in the right way to execute the business process, or like a SOA Supervisor who keeps track of everything and makes corrections when needed, then we are almost there !

Are we there yet or even close ? The author has his doubts, and I have my doubts too, especially after I have just seen at the end of last quarter when I had to work over the weekend and stay in a manufacturing site in Hungary to help supporting their processes and logistic systems  how many intelligent people have to stand by during those critical days to ensure everything goes smooth and to correct all the unforeseen situations and complicated problems coming up.

LBM can be applied everywhere in our life and the second part of the books describes how LBM can be ( or already is ?) applied to military, science, sex, health, psychology, laws, religion, politics, and management of course.

May be human beings will always fight against LBM. May be it is against our nature. May be we are not willing to give up our brain and what we can do with it. But wouldn’t it bee the smartest thing to do to use our brain to finally get rid of it ?

Online applications – the next step …

Zoho and Google Docs are two famous examples for provider of online applications offering spreadsheets, document writing, notebooks, calendar, databases, wikis and much more online in the web without the need to install anything on your desktop. These applications have been improved to an extent that they provide lots of features meanwhile so that they become a true and useful replacement for desktop software, and also their user interfaces became so dynamic that sometimes it is hard to figure out the difference between a desktop and a web based application.

All these offerings so far have been what I would call multi-purpose tools you can use for everything during your business day.

Today Lifehacker had an article about a new offering from Zoho: Zoho People. The aim of this offering is to help your company’s HR department keep track of the org chart, recruit candidates, and quickly fill out expense and vacation forms.

After having looked at their home page and screen shots I got the feeling that online applications take the next step now. After coming up with multi-purpose tools in the recent years now the first more business specifc web applications hit the market, this one targeting Human Resource Management for companies.

How long will it take until companies run their entire business based on web applications ?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) including Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Stock / Inventory Management, Manufacturing Capacity Planning and Work Load Optimization, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Risk and Compliance solutions and Performance Management – so far everything what SAP has to offer -, Project Management, more Human Resource Management applications, and you name it …

When will all those applications be available as an easy to access and use online application ? What will be the licensing model for those offerings and what gurantee do users have that their data is safe and accurate when using those applications ?

Let me predict here that this will become a huge market in the next years.

Besides the risk, imagine the potential: if multiple supplier use the same SCM applications on the web, wouldn’t it be easier to connect those in order to better manage the entire supply chain covering all suppliers of a particular product manufacturer ? If through smart web2.0 technology and social software we can achieve to plug in Market Demand Management on the other side based on direct customer and consumer input, could we come up with the fully automated supply chain management solution by simply having integrated customer demand and supplier inventory and pipelines ?

Could applications like Zoho People access social networks in the future to discover other useful candidates to apply for an open job ? Could those HR applications explore automatically the skill of a candidate by scanning through his blog posts and wiki contributions ?

What other idea did come up in your mind after reading this ?