E‐Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy

Citation

Rausch, E. (2002), "E‐Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 7, pp. 408-409. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.23.7.408.2

This book is full of intriguing thoughts. They are also challenging, maybe beyond what we may consider reasonable. Can we really rise to his suggestion that we do the impossible? Hargrove believes that each one of us has the potential to do just that – create the impossible future. He suggests that we make three specific declarations that will move us into the reinvention paradigm:

1. 1.

   1 I declare that what is possible is what I say is possible. For example, I declare as possible that our company will be the future XYZ industry.

2. 2.

   2 I declare that who I am is the stand that I take. This declaration gives me the power to stretch my definition of myself.

3. 3.

   3 The stand that I take is … this declaration represents my commitment to transform a possibility into a reality – it gives me the power to persist in the face of difficult facts and circumstances.

This is not just change, or even transformation as we usually think of it. He urges us to see it not only as transformation of our organizations, but also as an alteration in who we are. That, he believes, can make the impossible, possible, for each one of us, in any given situation.

To him, e‐leaders leave behind the thought process which focuses on strategy to create structure and system. They step into a new way of looking at what they are doing – working with processes and people, and spirits and hearts, not just heads and hands. There are many thoughts in E‐Leader which flesh out this viewpoint. He speaks of CEOs moving away from being stewards of what is to becoming entrepreneurs who bring about “creative destruction” – the way we might raze a building if the land can support a far more productive structure. He suggests that rather than playing the existing game, changing the game may be more rewarding. Abandoning top‐down leadership with its “Me point of view” and adopting lateral, coach/mentor leadership and a “You point of view” is part of such changes, as is concentration on building brands rather than emphasis on perfecting production. He coins the word E‐Tailer (Internet retailer) to emphasize the need for creativity in building e‐businesses.

With innumerable anecdotes about examples of people and organizations who achieved being effectively “different” and of some who missed the boat in one way or another, Hargrove makes his book a lively read that is hard to put down once started. One of his style techniques is to use tabular listings which he calls “templates”; these summarize, more or less, what he discusses in the respective section of the book. One example of such a template is “The new leadership paradigm” which has brief paragraphs under titles such as:

• •

  From thinking vertically down the same old ruts to thinking laterally and creatively;

• •

  From the old power of authority to the new power of collaboration;

• •

  From the stand‐alone corporations to the enterprise Web; and

• •

  From IQ (intelligence quotient) to EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) or from managing your organization, to managingrelationships.

For someone who wants to know how to get to the promised land which the inspirational messages paint, the last chapter provides something resembling a roadmap, including the final template. It describes how to build an organization that can be “different” in the positive sense of the word. It suggests an approach that can develop people – the members of the organization – into creative leaders who can make the dream come true, by cloning their talents through mentoring and coaching.

Hargrove believes that, for global corporations, executive coaching may be the only way to develop executives in a business‐connected way. For smaller dot.coms, executive coaching may be the only way to maintain any correlations between the speed of growth and the pace of development.

As an example he describes an executive‐development‐through‐coaching programme which he and J. Pieters, the head of executive development at Philips co‐designed and implemented. That program was in three phases, involving 360 degree feedback, use of world‐class executive coaches (Hargrove’s company), and leaders developing leaders. As guidance for this process, the five‐step Masterful Coaching Method was used:

• •

  Step 1. Develop a personal leadership mission.

• •

  Step 2. Develop a teachable point of view (for shifting mindset and behaviour) so as to achieve the mission.

• •

  Step 3. Set stretch goalscollaboratively.

• •

  Step 4. Forward the action through small, doable breakthrough projects.

• •

  Step 5. Provide feedback andlearning.

As I have stated in the beginning, there is a plethora of ideas in E‐Leaders, and that makes reading the book worthwhile. At the same time, as in most books, there are some aspects that I found annoying. Many of the anecdotes seemed as though they were seen from the eye of an observer who was not fully objective, or careful in the choice of subjects.

This is not the only book that picked companies as outstanding examples, which soon after publication turned out to have been poor choices. Hargrove’s selection of Enron, especially, but also of Williams and GE Capital, are especially jarring, partly because they hit the reader early in the book.

Hargrove’s strong promotion of his own masterful coaching concept toward the end of the book, as the road to fulfill the high expectations of self‐and‐organizational‐renewal to achieve the “impossible”, lacks credibility. It conflicts with the high expectations set up in the early chapters and thus ends the book on what seemed to me to be a slightly sour note.

Still, I stand on my original statement that this is an interesting and challenging book that is well worth reading. Furthermore, I also strongly agree with the position Hargrove states near the end, that the really competent leader is one who coaches and mentors. In fact I have occasionally gone one little step further and said that such a leader is not only a coach and mentor, but also a learning leader.