E-nough Is Enough!

Book: eLeadership: Bold Solutions for the New Economy
Author: Susan Annunzio
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Price: $25

Book: E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy
Author: Robert Hargrove
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Price: $26

E-gad! Here we are, only a few short years into this new-economy thing, and already we've run the poor letter "e" into the ground. Email, a simple enough application in the beginning, has been e-viscerated by the e-mergence of e-commerce, which is part of e-business, conducted by e-companies that have e-strategies. This e-nables them to compete in the e-revolution that is going on in the e-world. The composite e-ffect is e-nough to turn e-veryone into Sesame Street's Oscar the Grouch and announce that "The next e-leven years of the new e-conomy will be brought to you be the letter 'e.' " E-nough!

The previous eruption was prompted by the emergence of two books with essentially the same title: eLeadership: Bold Solutions for the New Economy, by Susan Annunzio, and E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy, by Robert Hargrove. It's not that the authors don't know their stuff. Annunzio is a consultant, Hargrove is a writer and consultant, and both have mastered the art of combining entertaining anecdotes and self-administered evaluations. Both also offer more than enough smart, helpful, and insightful points to earn praise for their useful and challenging books.

It's just that their dreaded e-word marketing ploys are the equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. What, exactly, makes an e-leader all that different from a leader? Not much, it seems, other than a general recognition that the new economy turns almost everything upside down, including our traditional definitions of leadership.

To Susan Annunzio's credit, she knows exactly who her target audience is, what they're up against, and what they need: baby boomers in large corporations, trying to make sense out of all of the changes that are going on in the new economy, and the tools to help them be leaders in it. "My goal is to prove to you that the opportunity of a lifetime may be sitting right in front of you," she states early on. "The opportunity to transform your company into a player in the eRevolution while winning the hearts and minds of your workforce."

Annunzio then gets down to the serious work of talking about the mind flips that leaders have to make just to survive, never mind flourish, in business today. If traditional leaders were tough old birds who issued orders and maintained control, she says, then new leaders share a very different list of qualities: honesty, including the ability to admit mistakes; responsiveness, particularly to employee suggestions; a willingness to learn (and relearn); a sense of adventure; and altruism, a desire to make a difference. "You have a choice," she writes. "You can keep your big corner office and settle for what you've got. You can jump ship to one of the exciting new dotcom companies -- many leaders disillusioned with corporate America are doing so. But you can also stay put at your 'traditional' business but change the rules. In the process, you might change the world -- or at least leave it a better place."

In one of her best chapters, Annunzio focuses on the ongoing struggle between baby boomers and the X and Y generations. Her solution is unequivocal: If leadership today is all about attracting and retaining talent and guiding and coaching collaboration, boomers in older companies have to come to terms with the legitimate aspirations of younger employees and adopt new approaches to keeping them engaged and productive.

Annunzio ends each chapter with coaching tips, diagnostics, and other tools. The take-aways are useful, but the message is even more important: If you want to become a leader in the new economy, the first transformation you have to effect is your own.

Which also happens to be Robert Hargrove's fundamental message. Like Annunzio, Hargrove gets off to an e-xceedingly e-xasperating start. Writing of AOL's TimeWarner acquisition, he observes, "To me, this was a historic moment in that it represented a single event in which the new eEconomy, based on electronic connections, trumped the old iEconomy based on physical mass." All I can say is, if we're going to spend the next 20 years putting little vowels in front of all of the words that describe the new economy, it's going to be a long 20 years.

But Hargrove soon tells us what he thinks is different about leadership today: It's a potent mixture of new-economy business practices -- leaders acting as entrepreneurs rather than as caretakers -- and New Age personal-growth exercises -- "declaring the future" rather than just accepting whatever happens.