Online gaming makes you a better businessperson, according to a new study. Collaboration, rapid-fire decision-making and opportunities for leadership are just a few of the skills that World of Warcraft and EverQuest — or IBM’s new Innov8, which IBM is marketing directly to corporations — are apparently teaching better than your nearest MBA program.

IBM, Stanford, and MIT collaborated with Seriosity, a new company focused on developing corporate software solution inspired by multi-player games, to look at how these online environments effectively mimick the challenges of a global economy:

One of the key findings from the research, says Thomas Malone, an MIT professor of management and Seriosity board member, is that companies need to create more opportunities for flexible, project-oriented leadership. In fast-paced games, people can jump in to manage a team for as little as 10 minutes, if they have the needed skills for the task at hand. “Games make leaders from lemmings,” says Tony O’Driscoll, an IBM learning strategist and one of the authors of the study. “Since leadership happens quickly and easily in online games, otherwise reserved players are more likely to try on leadership roles.”

The study points out that games can become “management flight simulators” of sorts, letting employees manage a global workforce in cyberspace before they do so in the real world. More than half of the managers surveyed say playing massive multiplayer games had helped them lead at work. Three-quarters of those surveyed believed that specific game tools, such as expressive avatars that can communicate via body language, as well as by voice and typing, would help manage remote employees in the real world.

Of course, many of the players of these games take on leadership roles because they are games and not the real world. Regardless of the virtual global economic utopia envisioned by many of these consultants, improving human-to-human interaction — and increasing genuine social skills — will matter for a very long time.

In any case, this is definitely a much cooler way to spend time at business conferences than listening to yet another PowerPoint.