21st Century e-Leadership: new wineskins for new wine

“E-Leader”
By Robert Hargrove
Perseus Publishing, 2001


You hear contradictory phrases these days. For example, you have “chaordic organization,” meaning a combination of “chaos and order,” an oxymoron at first glance: Isn’t an organization supposed to install order? This was coined by Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International, the same firm that grew phenomenally. Of course, he was antedated by Alfred North Whitehead who defined progress as “the art of creating chaos in the midst of order, and preserving order in the midst of chaos.”

“Lateral leadership” is another phrase that assaults our time-tested concept of leaders who preside from the top over everyone else below him. This phrase talks about a leader who steps down from his elevated position and deals with his people as his “equals.” The latter, in turn, leave a slight concession to their leader by accepting him as primus inter pares (first among equals).

Another phrase, “spontaneous CEO,” unsettles our widely held view that a CEO is steeped in strategic planning and thus hardly acts on impulse at the spur of the moment.

The above three are only part of a wide range of new vocabulary that now punctuates third millenium leadership books. It delivers an earthshaking message: We have really such a deeply altered world that the old leadership formula longer works, and leaders, if they have to thrive -- if not merely survive --must change.

This is the startling message of the book “E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy.” It is rightly called a “brilliant flash of light on the new emerging leadership paradigm of the 21st century.”

Author Robert Hargrove, leadership coach of many CEOs, declared at the outset that CEOs in this century must move quickly from being stewards “conserving what has been built” to being revolutionaries engaged in a balancing act of “maintaining equilibrium and creative destruction.”

Is this the domain of young emergent leaders, ruling out retirable fiftyish and sixtyish CEOs? Not necessarily. Mr. Hargrove was generously quoting Dee Hock of Visa, Jack Welch of GE, Lou Gerstner of IBM, Carly Fiorina, all of whom preached – then practiced – re-branding their companies thus propelled them to new growth platforms and unheard of efficiency and profitability.

“People’s horizon of possibilities,” he points out, “is limited.” What he is saying is that the connected economy presents possibilities that are so infinite but traditional leaders’ visions are so finite. The profoundly transformed environment demands a deeplly-altered CEO mindset.

This truth is actually both timely and timeless. One ever timeless advice actually came from “Jesus the CEO” who said: “For new wine, you need new wineskins.” New ideas require new strategies and structures.

The book thus recommends Triple-Loop Learning” which asks three fundamental questions dealing with three verbs: to be, think, and do.

First question: How do I need to be different? (Begin seeing yourself differently.) Second: How do I need to think differently? (Start to question what you take for granted.) The third question: What do I need to do differently? (Jump into action – the eEconomy waits for no one.) The book templates on exercises that involve the transition from … to, with the useful insight that these have worked in many coaching tasks by the author.

Does this mean that the old reliable leadership and management concepts are passe? Not really. The author still quotes Peter Drucker’s “classic question” (his words): “What is our business and what should it be?” You still have to ask the question: What is the logic of our business? But logic, according to Asian Institute of Management Associate Dean Sonny Coloma, has given way to the fashionable question: “What is your business model?”

Actually, the book offers four steps by which CEOs can build a super-successful “business Internet model”. First, start with some customer reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Second, create a strategy of pre-eminence, assuming the mantle of leadership. Third, choose partners wisely so as to leverage your strategy. Fourth, enable your business design with relationship technology.

One message stands out in this book: Even in the midst of rapid changes in technology requiring leadership style transformation, some things remain constant – that the logic of business – listening to and reaching the customer (improved version: anticipating the customer) remains the most important function of business.

The difference is technology. The book cites the “clickable corporation,” a phrase popularized in a book of that title, which enumerates in a table eight success strategies to successful customer relationship. Get the book and click away.

The book is not only one’s road map to look yourself and your company over for needed transformation. It is wondrously keyed to liberating the CEO from the strictures of the past. The leadership coach concludes with, perhaps, his favorite theme – which could be the conclusion of the reader when he is through with the book: “Release the human spirit.”