Management Musings

In the past couple of weeks, a huge controversy has broken out in the Indian Premier League (IPL), a popular cricket tournament organized by the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI). 3 players of the Rajasthan Royals, one of the 9 teams in the competition were arrested by the Delhi police for their alleged involvement with bookies and underperforming in their roles for the team during various cricket matches. Although the element of fixing is not new to cricket, having famously been admitted to by Hansie Cronje, the South African cricket team captain in the year 2000, the recent arrests and ongoing investigations by the police has lead to wide spread outrage amongst cricket followers and fans in India and elsewhere. The evidence against the three players was telephone conversations and the footage from the games in which they underperformed. While the fallout of the investigations continue, the captain of the affected team, Rahul Dravid, called the effect of having the playe...

Gamification, as explained in some detail here (https://class.coursera.org/gamification-002/class/index), is about applying game elements to business contexts. There are numerous game-like elements that have been applied to various websites and business models that have been widely successful. One popular example is FourSqaure.com, as quoted by the professor in the course mentioned above. FourSquare gives away all kinds of badges to the users of the website for achievements as varied as checking into a restaurant or location some X number of times, for logging in Y number of times, etc. That is an example of Badges, which is a game element, being employed for the specific purpose of engaging people and making it a habit for the users to log in to foursquare and report their specific location. Now that is an example of gamification as deployed in a very commercial sense. Although I am not immediately aware of the business model for FourSquare, vis-a-vis their revenue generation model...