We are caught in a pincer grip between intensifying competitive pressure and accelerating change in the landscape around us, creating enormous performance pressures. What we know today is becoming less valuable as we struggle with the challenge of innovating faster and learning faster to operate more effectively in these challenging times.

Mention learning to senior executives, and they tend to default immediately to training programs. Here's the problem: Training programs are effective only at transferring what we already know to others. How do we create powerful platforms jointly to innovate and develop new knowledge that no one had before?

For an answer to this question, executives would be well advised to look at World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game. Few executives have heard of this game, much less participated in it, despite the fact that over 10 million players are active in it around the world. Upon hearing this, most executives are likely to respond that "that's an awful lot of pimply teenagers," falling back on a conventional stereotype about video game players. In fact, the majority of the players are in the 23-39-year-old bracket and are deeply engaged. The average player invests about 23 hours per week playing the game.

Points for Experience

In WoW, performance is measured in terms of experience points. Players accumulate these by performing a variety of tasks that become more challenging as the game progresses. As players accumulate experience points, they advance to higher levels in the game, culminating at this point in level 80 (a new add-on recently expanded the number of levels from 70 in order to keep experienced players challenged).

The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as you advance across levels, and the number of experience points needed in order to advance also increases sharply with each level. Yet the number of hours required to get there actually decreases. Experienced players become adept at leveraging the resources available in and around WoW to learn faster and advance faster even as the challenges become more difficult. In contrast to the diminishing returns to learning that we often encounter in business, players in WoW appear to have joined an environment where there are increasing returns to learning.

As with many promising developments on the edge, it is often hard to discern how or why this might be relevant to those playing in core business arenas. WoW matters because it creates a powerful platform for learning, without a training program in sight. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to business executives as they strive to improve performance more rapidly in their own organizations.

Bottom-line lessons for executives

Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement

WoW is carefully structured so that anyone can join and quickly gain a sense of accomplishment. The early tasks are relatively simple, but novice players quickly learn to improvise and innovate in their approach to performance challenges.

Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance

WoW provides players with an overall metric for performance in the form of experience points and levels, but it also enables players to assess in real time their own performance and the performance of teammates along a variety of dimensions. One of the key innovations in the game offers players the ability to craft personal "dashboards" to monitor their performance on certain tasks. Corporations have begun to offer senior executives dashboards to monitor key aspects of corporate performance.

What if these dashboards were made available to everyone in the company? What if these dashboards could be designed and tailored by the individual employee? What if these dashboards provided real-time feedback on individual performance as well as the performance of the broader group? What if this feedback was visible to everyone and not just the individual contributor? Within WoW, this real-time performance feedback helps players to focus their innovation in game play on the areas with greatest impact.

Keep raising the bar

WoW designers have constructed an environment that continually challenges players to develop new skills. Complacency and boredom are rarely encountered, but neither is frustration, since challenges are thoughtfully calibrated to the existing capabilities of players. The next rung of achievement is just in sight, motivating players to invest the time and effort necessary to achieve that next level of performance. In the real world, companies, particularly those pursuing high growth strategies should provide a continuing set of new challenges to drive innovation by their employees.

Don't neglect intrinsic motivations

Talk about incentives in a business context, and the discussion quickly falls back to cash. With minor exceptions, cash is not an incentive to play WoW, so the designers focused on intrinsic motivations. Players get widespread recognition as they master new skills and successfully address each new challenge. As the game advances, players learn to collaborate and participate in "guilds"—teams of players who must work together to innovate in their game play and achieve the next level of performance. As relationships and trust develop within these teams, everyone is motivated to innovate by the desire not to let the team down.

Provide opportunities to develop tacit knowledge, but do not neglect broader knowledge exchange

The guilds foster the relationships and trust required to generate new tacit knowledge—the kind of knowledge that cannot be easily expressed and develops through shared practice. This is where most of the innovation in game play occurs.

At the same time, the game has generated a rich ecology of online forums where players can share experiences, post requests for help in addressing new challenges, and learn from each other. These forums provide a "pull" platform where players encountering unanticipated needs can quickly reach out and assemble helpful resources. In contrast to knowledge management initiatives in more conventional corporate environments, a significant part of a player's recognition and status accrues from participation in these forums. In fact, these forums have become a primary vehicle for identifying high performing players to be recruited into guilds.

Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging performance targets

Participation in guilds in WoW is not mandated from above. Players naturally coalesce into guilds as they move into more advanced levels because they realize they cannot accomplish the tasks without collaborating with others with complementary skills. Teams have become important organizational units within companies, but how many of these teams are self-organized? By giving teams the autonomy to recruit new participants and—equally importantly—expel participants who are not carrying their weight, companies can significantly increase the accountability and motivation of teams.

Encourage frequent and rigorous performance feedback

WoW designers built in detailed performance metrics specific to the individual, the role, and the guild. These provide a foundation for regular after-action reviews where all the participants come together after a major initiative to review how they performed as individuals and as a team. The key focus is on how they can do better. This is a catalyst to innovation in game play as players can see performance gaps that are holding back the progress of the team.

These 360-degree performance reviews ensure that everyone from the guild leader down to the newest member receives feedback. Unlike the 360-degree reviews that have begun to crop up in a corporate setting, the reviews are based on objective, quantified performance metrics and visible to all participants. In this environment, poor performers at all levels have a strong incentive to address performance gaps in order to avoid being sidelined in future initiatives.

Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

WoW not only encourages players to develop new skills; it fosters a new disposition. WoW has created a compelling environment that naturally attracts participants interested in gaming, but it also enhances and rewards their dedication over time.

This encourages players to seek out new challenges as an opportunity to innovate and learn faster. Rather than viewing the unanticipated as a threat, gamers learn to welcome unexpected events as an opportunity to innovate, tinker, experiment, and, in the process, learn even more.

They also learn to welcome collaboration as an opportunity to learn faster by focusing on a set of individual strengths while being exposed to the diverse perspectives and experiences of those with complementary strengths. At the end of the day, this is the most powerful contribution of WoW. This disposition creates an amplifying effect throughout the game. Players seek out other players who share this point of view, and they end up performing better than players who bring more conventional ideas to the game.

Companies seeking to thrive in a world of increasing uncertainty and accelerating change will need to foster this disposition among their own executive team and employees. They would be well advised to take a closer look at World of Warcraft, both in terms of the approach taken to foster this disposition and as a potential recruiting ground for employees who can bring this attitude and approach into the company.

A company called Genkii is hoping to rope a chunk of the 40-million worldwide web-connected phones and iTouches into a new 3D avatar-based virtual world, Sparkle. Too bad virtual worlds died around 4 years ago.

Genkii appear to have had Sparkle in the works for quite some time, but they must have spat out whatever drink they were drinking at the time when Apple announced their inter-app micro-commerce structure for iPhone 3.0, which is perfectly tailored to Second Life's "pay 65 cents, increase penis length by 200%" mini economy.

Currently, Genkii has a $5 IM app in the App Store that ties into your Second Life IM account. They hope to expand their actual standalone virtual world later this year, preserving the ability to tie into pre-existing worlds like Second Life and Playstation Home.

If there is anyone out there who can't wait to get a mini avatar on their iPhone, buy it clothes and an apartment, and seek out other mini avatars to IM with, forgive my skepticism. But I think Sparkle has missed the boat by about a half decade. We'll see what happens. [TechCrunch]

World's Hottest Billionaire Playgrounds

Basil's Bar & Restaurant is a wooden shack of a beach bar located on the remote Caribbean island of Mustique. But despite its understated look, a night out at Basil's could bring you face to face with Tommy Hilfiger, Mick Jagger, Denzel Washington or even Queen Elizabeth.

"Here, they get to let their hair down and be normal people," says owner Basil Charles. "Bill Gates was sitting at the end of my bar reading a book one morning--I had no idea who this man was."

This 30-year-old establishment is one of the liveliest--and one of the only--bars on Mustique.

Nicknamed "Billionaires Island," the 1,400-acre Mustique is so exclusive, there's only one hotel--the 17-room Cotton House Hotel. Most wealthy visitors rent one of 100 private villas, which run as much as $150,000 a week. Staffed with private chefs, butlers and maids, these full-service, two- to nine-bedroom residences give the mega-rich the opportunity to stay in what are essentially their own private hotels.

Mustique is one of a handful of exclusive and exotic hot spots billionaires go to relax and blow off steam. Whether they crave pristine beaches, rugged mountains or just a ridiculous resort in the middle of nowhere, billionaires have the megabucks to lap up luxury anywhere they desire.

In Pictures: World's Hottest Billionaire Playgrounds

And if they want a destination with a little more glamour and action than remote Mustique, they jet to the French port town of St. Tropez to show off their hard-earned assets.

The French Rivera's most popular summertime spot offers one of the most glamorous ports in the Mediterranean, where owners of some of the world's largest yachts drop anchor to raise their glasses in the town's bustling bars, restaurants and nightclubs.

Since computers are, if nothing else, starkly logical, for as long as they have been around, there have been people who have hoped that the machines might serve as an example to their human overlords, helping to make certain human affairs--politics, say--a little more logical too.

One of them is Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at M.I.T. with an idea for a program designed to help people appreciate that the logical path they have just traveled in a political or other discussion might not have been entirely straight and narrow.

Despite being just 27 years old and in only the second year of his professorship, Aaronson is widely known in his field, quantum computing.

Quantum computers work in ways utterly different from conventional ones, and can do some tasks--breaking encryption, say--unimaginably quickly. So far, only small-scale, prototype quantum computers have been built, and it's not yet clear whether one big enough to be useful will ever be technically possible.

Aaronson's work involves quantum software, meaning, as members of his field like to say, that he spends his time thinking about programs for machines that might never get built.

One of his side projects, though, is a work-in-progress political program called the Worldview Manager. It has nothing to do with quantum machines or, indeed, of advanced computing of any sort. In fact, it's so simple and straightforward an idea that you could write it with macros in Excel.

The goal of Worldview Manager, explains Aaronson, is to help people appreciate the inconsistencies and contradictions that might crop up in their social and political beliefs.

In Depth: World's Friendliest Countries

The country that once welcomed the tired, poor, huddled masses is now asking for a little reciprocation. And Canada,Germany and Australia are heeding the call.

They top a list of the countries most welcoming to expats. There, relocators have a relatively easy time befriending locals, joining a local community group and learning the local language.

Canada is the most welcoming; almost 95% of respondents to HSBC Bank International's Expat Exploreer Survey, released today, said they have made friends with locals. In Germany, 92% were so lucky and in Australia 91% befriended those living there. The United Arab Emirates was found to be the most difficult for expats; only 54% of those surveyed said they'd made friends with locals.

In Depth: World's Friendliest Countries

Behind The Numbers
The study surveyed 2,155 expats in 48 countries, spanning four continents, between February and April 2008. Respondents rated their country in four categories: ability to befriend locals, number that joined a community group, number that learned the language and percentage that bought property.

"We conducted this survey to better understand expatriate needs and get insight into the emotions of expats. The banking business is all about trust, especially with the recent credit crisis," says Martin Spurling, CEO of HSBC Bank International and Head of HSBC Global Offshore. "We want them to build a relationship with their wealth manager regardless of where they travel."

For Americans, traveling abroad to start over is becoming increasingly common. America used to have it all: good jobs, booming economy, skyrocketing stock market and plentiful housing. What a difference a year can make. The boom has gone bust and people are now heading for the exits en masse--with an eye abroad.

It's no wonder they likely find Canada so welcoming. It has an accessible language, diverse culture and low levels of government corruption, says Patricia Linderman, editor of Tales from a Small Planet, an online newsletter for expats.

It also has other expats. This is important, Linderman says, since even the most gracious locals already have busy, established lives and can be unwilling to put in the effort to befriend someone they know could leave within several years.

"I'm not suggesting that it's good to live in an 'expat ghetto'. It's immensely rewarding to live among local people and make friends with them," she says.

Linderman says other expats are important because they share similar needs like making friends and adjusting to life in a new country. They also understand the frustrations daily life brings.

World's most valuable resource, a curse for most Nigerians

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria (CNN) -- Trash litters its cities. Electricity is sporadic at best. There is no clean water. Medical and educational services are limited. Basic infrastructure is severely lacking.

"Planet in Peril" met in a secret location with members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.

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These are not conditions that should plague one of the richest oil states in the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars has been made from the Niger Delta's oil reserves and many people have gotten very rich. Conversely, the average Nigerian has suffered as a result of the country's oil prosperity. The United States Agency for International Development says more than 70 percent of the country lives on less than a dollar a day -- the population is among the 20 poorest in the world.

Oil companies are only part of the equation. The other is the Nigerian government. Transparency International, a global organization intent on stamping out corruption, has consistently rated Nigeria's government one of the most corrupt in the world.

Nigeria's federal government and oil companies split oil profits roughly 60-40. The money is then supposed to make its way down to the local governments to fund various projects. Somehow, little money actually reaches its intended destination. Nigeria's own corruption agency estimates between $300 billion to $400 billion has been stolen or wasted over the last 50 years. Lisa Ling travels to secret location to meet notorious Nigerian militant group »

Gov. Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers state, one of the largest oil producers of Nigeria's 36 states, acknowledges past problems with corruption, but thinks progress is being made.

"There's a lot of improvement," Amaechi said. "The work being done by the corruption agency and the federal government has somehow been able to control the level of corruption in government."

Over the last few years, a culture of militancy and violence has arisen in the absence of jobs and services. Kidnappings for ransom, robberies and even murder happen with regularity.

The biggest and most powerful armed group is the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. They say they are at war against the Nigerian military and the oil companies operating there.

MEND, formed in 2005, said it has more than 30 camps throughout Nigeria. Members are armed with high-tech weaponry they said was obtained from "foreign sources." Hundreds of people have been killed on both sides and countless oil workers have been kidnapped.

Over the years, MEND's attacks on oil pipelines have halted oil production and, therefore, raised the price of oil around the world. They demand oil profits be distributed to average Nigerians of the Niger Delta and said they will not stop their attacks until their objectives have been fulfilled. See environmental battle lines for "Planet in Peril" »

The battle is over oil -- one of the world's most valuable resources. But to most Nigerians -- oil is a curse.

Communities along the Niger Delta have lived off subsistence fishing and agriculture for decades. Collecting food becomes impossible when a spill happens, like one that occurred in August. The waterways and mangroves are blanketed in thick brown oil sludge that goes on for miles. Toxicity overpowers the air and a sense of lifelessness pervades the landscape. Many say it will take 10-15 years for the area to be free of contamination -- if the cleanup effort commences in a timely manner.

The August spill was a result of a leak from an old pipeline that had corroded. It took the oil company three months to clamp the leak, but the company said it wasn't reported for a full month after it began. Once the leak was reported, the company said it was denied access to the site by the community. Leaders of the village deny that, and the finger-pointing between the two sides is nothing new -- there is no love lost here.

Who is telling the truth? Who knows? Either way, the creeks are blackened. This is life in the Niger Delta.

Japan - world's No. 2 economy - in recession

TOKYO (CNN) -- Japan, the world's second-largest economy, is in a recession, government officials announced Monday.

Japan's Cabinet Office confirmed that its economy fell another 0.1% in its third quarter, following a 0.3% drop in the second quarter.

The country's gross domestic product - second to that of the United States - has fallen by 0.4% this year.

Stocks on the Nikkei were trading about 1% higher in Monday morning trading.

Major indexes around the globe have plummeted over the last two months. The Russian stock market has lost 65.5% of its value since the start of the year. Stocks in Japan and the United States have been equally hard hit, falling 42% and 33%, respectively.

In Europe, the pain has been particularly acute. The European Union on Friday officially declared that the 15-nation group had entered into a recession, with its gross domestic product declining 0.2% for the second straight quarter.

Japan's recession announcement was not unexpected. Part of the problem is the strong yen, which skyrocketed in recent weeks as turmoil in the world's financial markets and concerns about a global recession drove investors away from high-yielding currencies such as the euro and the pound. As a result, lower-yielding currencies like the dollar and the yen surged in value because they are considered by many investors to be a safe-haven.

Since Japan is such a big exporter of goods, a more robust yen hurts profits for Japanese firms as sales from abroad get translated back into yen. The more that the yen has climbed, the worse Japan's stock market has performed, which has resulted in a ripple effect on European and U.S. exchanges.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- World leaders convened Saturday for a second straight day hoping to tackle a financial crisis that has ricocheted across the globe and left the United States and other countries on the brink of deep recessions.

Their goal: to prevent a similar calamity from happening again.

The historic two-day summit meeting, which brought together prime ministers and presidents from Group of 20 countries, was in full swing Saturday following an extravagant working dinner at the White House.

"We had a good frank discussion last night," President Bush said. "There's some progress being made, but there's still a lot more work to be done."

The conference participants were aiming to figure out what caused the global crisis and assess government responses to it, Bush said Friday. The summit would also identify regulatory reforms and launch a "specific action plan" to implement them, he said.

"Billions of hardworking people are counting on us to strengthen our financial systems for the long term," he added.

Bush and fellow G-20 leaders are expected to issue a statement at about 3 p.m. ET on the findings of the summit.

Still, many experts anticipate that announcement to be light on specifics.

"I think it is going to be pretty vague," said Simon Johnson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. "You could call it productive chaos."

In the days leading up to the summit, speculation abounded that leaders would accomplish little else but narrowing the focus for future talks - likely to be held in the first few months of 2009 after U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is sworn into office.

Obama is not attending this weekend's summit. He sent as emissaries former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa.

Bush, who offered to host the meeting nearly a month ago, echoed those exact sentiments in remarks made earlier this week. The imminent change in power at the White House has led many to believe that could also hamper any progress.

Attendees of the summit include leaders from such nations as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

The pace of the world's financial problems - rooted in large part in the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the risky lending and borrowing that went along with it - have accelerated in recent weeks.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group based in Paris, said this week that the gross domestic product for its 30 members was likely to fall by 0.3% in 2009.

Major indexes around the globe have fallen off a cliff over the last two months. The Russian stock market has lost 65.5% of its value since the start of the year. Stocks in Japan and the United States have been equally hard hit, falling 42% and 33%, respectively.

In Europe, the pain has been particularly acute. The European Union on Friday officially declared that the 15-nation group had entered into a recession, with its gross domestic product declining 0.2% for the second straight quarter.

And other countries have nearly collapsed under the weight the economic crisis.

In Iceland, where the government intervened to save the banking system from total failure, inflation is running at a painful 12.1% while economic growth has nearly flatlined.

Hoping to halt the contagion, central bankers and government officials have taken unprecedented steps in recent weeks.

Britain, France and the United States have bought ownership stakes in banks and pumped them full of capital in the hopes of unlocking frozen credit markets. Earlier this week, China unveiled a massive, $585 billion economic stimulus package to try to keep its once red-hot economy moving forward.

With the crisis showing no signs of abating, several leaders have been trying to advance an agenda for the talks, which some observers have referred to as "Bretton Woods II" - a nod to a similar global economic summit held in July 1944 to reverse some of the painful trade and foreign exchange policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression.

There have been calls, for example, to create a global accounting standard to replace the current mark-to-market standard, which some have blamed for the billions of dollars of losses suffered by banks.

Credit rating agencies and hedge funds have also become a target. French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who has embraced a hard-line approach toward regulation, has publicly said he is in favor of greater oversight of both industries.

And there has also been speculation that additional countries could enact economic stimulus packages of their own in the wake of the talks.

One underlying fear that President Bush attempted to address in recent days, including in an op-ed piece he wrote in Saturday's edition of The Wall Street Journal, is rising protectionism.

There is concern that some countries could levy harsh tariffs on imports to prop up their ailing economies, or that some governments could try to restrict capital flows, which spelled disaster for many emerging economies as the crisis gained momentum.

But what is expected to remain front and center is the subject of regulation and how to best modernize the global financial system for the 21st century.

One approach could involve granting greater powers to the Financial Stability Forum, which represents central bankers and regulators, or the International Monetary Fund, which has played a large role in recent weeks helping to bail out struggling countries.

Another possibility could involve the creation of a college of regulatory supervisors that would exchange notes about some of the trends and risks they are seeing within their own borders.

World leaders edged closer to an agreement Saturday that would flag risky investing and regulatory weak spots, with President George W. Bush welcoming the progress at an emergency economic summit.

Nearly two dozen foreign leaders got down to work at the largest gathering of its kind in nearly a decade. A chief goal was charting a map to avoid future financial meltdowns like the one now imperiling the global economy. Leaders also sought to find ways to revive the economy, which has pushed up unemployment and shrunk savings.

Under the glare of an intense political and public spotlight, the presidents and prime ministers needed to be careful not to let the talks become a blame game, which could further roil the fragile markets.

A thorny issue was whether all nations should pledge to enact government spending plans to stimulate their economies. It appeared likely the leaders would endorse the benefits of that approach, but stop short of a commitment for all participants to act at the same time.

To help prevent future crises, Bush and his counterparts prepared to endorse a plan for more openness in financial markets and an early warning system for problems such as the speculation frenzy that fed the U.S. housing bubble.

"I am pleased that we are discussing a way forward to make sure that such a crisis is unlikely to occur again," Bush said as discussed got under way. "Obviously, you know, this crisis has not ended. There's some progress being made, but there's still a lot more work to be done."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters that the leaders will achieve consensus on a plan "that includes almost 50 actions that have to be implemented by the end of March." She added, "The point is that all actors on the market, all products and all markets shall be really regulated and surveyed."