Eleadership: Proven Techniques For Creating An Environment Of Speed And Flexibility In The Digital Economy - Hardcover

Annunzio, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743204387 ISBN 13: 9780743204385

Publisher: Free Press, 2001

Synopsis

What if the rules that made you successful were the cause of your current problems? What if the name of the game was personal fulfillment rather than power and wealth? What if the biggest threat to your company's future was employee dissatisfaction? What if success in the digital economy depended on refreshing your work environment? What if you could eliminate friction between baby boomers and younger workers? What if the answer was eLeadership? From one of the world's leading management consultants comes a dynamic new style of leadership that will enlighten and inspire executives to rethink and retool their companies for the eWorld. Transforming today's overwhelmed corporate executive into an eLeader requires launching a revolution in the workplace. But the payoffs -- personal and professional -- can be extraordinary. With business practices changing on a daily basis, companies must create environments of speed and flexibility that will engage today's employees and allow radical ideas to thrive, because only those companies that move first and innovate fast will reap the financial rewards the digital economy has to offer. In eLeadership, author and consultant Susan Annunzio takes you beyond typical management-speak, offering a real blueprint for leading this revolution. Readers will learn to inspire, encourage, and retain staff at all levels. Annunzio teaches new ways to: Create a twenty-first-century vision for your company Promote environments that succeed in the eWorld Think about what a company is and what it should look like Ignite passion for saving America's traditional businesses Through dozens of real-world examples of eLeadership in action, Annunzio shares the five critical steps to heroic leadership, and shows how to close the gap between the baby boomers and the younger Generations X and Y to create a more productive working environment. As this timely book shows, the greatest opportunity to make a difference in corporate America today may be in attacking traditional priorities in unconventional ways.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Annunzio is a partner at Nextera, a leading global management consultancy firm. She is a recognized authority in the field of change man-agement and a sought-after adviser to senior corporate leaders around the world, as well as being the coauthor with Marcia B. Cherney of Communicoding. Annunzio also is assistant adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and is quoted frequently in leading business media, including The Wall Street Journal and Management Review. She lives in Chicago, Illinois, with her two children, Christopher and Angie Rose.

Reviews

Annunzio, consultant with Nextera Enterprises, says that today's CEOs and managers must take a fresh approach to work, even if they're not actively involved in the Internet economy. With changes occurring almost continuously, executives need to recruit the best employees, encourage radical thinking and foster communication (especially among younger workers). Annunzio gives a rare and detailed treatment of the workplace relationship between generations X and Y. Enhanced by real-life examples, her points are sharpened by bulleted lists.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Annunzio is a consultant specializing in leadership, communication, and e-business transformation; has taught business at Chicago's Depaul University; and is an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago. She is also a partner at Nextera, part of the Knowledge Universe consulting and training conglomerate headed by Michael Milken. Annunzio is certainly not the first to make the case that successful companies today must react quickly and be flexible. But while others have offered strategies and proposed organizational structures best suited to this new environment, Annunzio (with the help of coauthor Liesse) focuses on leadership skills. She argues that today's successful leader requires skills and qualities "quite different from the old command-and-control leaders of yesterday": honesty, responsiveness, vigilance, a willingness to learn (and relearn), a sense of adventure, vision, and altruism. Communicating well is key, says Annunzio, as she spotlights differences in the philosophies and viewpoints between the baby-boom generation and that of the so-called "X" and "Y" generations. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The eLeadership Challenge

What if one morning you arrived at your corporate offices and no one was there?

Your marketing staffers had decided to base themselves at various client headquarters.

The salespeople, equipped with Palm Pilots, Thinkpads, and digital wireless phones, were operating in mobile virtual offices.

Because of economics, customer service had been moved to another city, as had your distribution warehouse.

The R&D team you assembled was a collection of brilliant thinkers located around the world who worked with each other on networked computers and the occasional videoconference.

Your support staff -- accounting, communications, corporate counsel -- preferred to telecommute, plugging into the network from home offices and talking to each other via email and fax.

Even your personal assistant actually was located at the offices of your corporate parent, five hundred miles away; you and he communicated via calendar software, pager, and overnight mail.

What if, sitting alone at a big desk, you realized you didn't need a corporate office building at all? What would you do?

Welcome to the world of eLeadership, where business strategies are fluid, workers are smarter and more demanding than ever, and the old rules of business just don't apply.

It's a world of global markets, ad hoc teams, telecommuters, email, videoconferences, online ordering, virtual offices, intranets, networked alliances, and instant information. And it's full of both challenges and opportunities for eLeaders.

What Is eLeadership?

eLeadership is a new style of business management designed specifically to guide top executives as they retool their businesses to compete in the eWorld.

In this brave new world, what does eLeadership entail?

eLeadership means shaking up your corporate culture and fostering an attitude of speed and flexibility in order to facilitate the internal transformation to an environment for the new economy.

eLeadership means managing the clash between baby boomers and the new, brash Generation X and Y workers -- and finding a way to combine the talents of both groups to achieve success.

eLeadership means making the tough decisions that will set your company on the path to success in the new economy -- and in the process save jobs, companies, and even entire industries.

eLeadership demands heroic behavior. It requires abandoning past business models and challenging current assumptions and beliefs. It entails breaking many of the rules we've played by for generations. It means sacrificing the comfort of the status quo in the quest for a new direction that will survive the eRevolution.

And most important, eLeadership ultimately is not about connecting technology, but about connecting people.

Says Dave Tolmie, CEO of yesmail.com, a permission email marketer, "The success of a new economy company is based on the collective capabilities of its people. Every company needs to be more collegial and less structured so that the collective talents have a way to manifest themselves."

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates echoed the significance of the work environment in his book Business at the Speed of Thought: "The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible."

Reinforcing that comment, international eBusiness consultant Eric Marcus says technology represents only 5 percent of the transformation process. The other 95 percent of a company's metamorphosis is represented by the changes in organizational behavior and culture that are at the heart of eLeadership.

As a leader, it's not your job to worry about how your technology is set up. There are people more techno-savvy than you to make those decisions. Your job is more compelling, and ultimately, more critical: to create an environment where everyone can unleash their creativity. Technology is not an end in itself, but merely an enabler in the search for new products and services.

In the example above, eLeadership means challenging the accepted belief that running a successful business includes bringing the entire staff under one roof from nine to five every day. eLeadership may require trusting employees to work independently in scattered offices. It may force you to give up some of the symbols of the Industrial Age: hierarchical organizations, clear lines of authority -- even office buildings.

eLeadership may force you to measure success differently, both corporately and personally. In the future, the world is going to measure success in terms of how many new ideas your company has generated and what kind of talent you're keeping and attracting. Meanwhile, you may need to reconsider golden parachutes, country-club memberships, and corner offices -- things that were the measures of success in the past. In the world we grew up in, these were ways of saying, "I made it." But they have become increasingly irrelevant.

eLeadership may mean finding new ways to be a leader: new ways to motivate when you don't see every employee every day, new ways to communicate your vision and create a culture, and new ways to think about what a company is and what it should look like.

We live in a world of new technology. We are bombarded by it every day. The availability of new tools has affected every company; it's forced them to reevaluate their businesses and rethink their strategies on marketing, distribution, communications, and organizational structure. Even if the strategy ultimately is to have no eStrategy, every business leader has had to rethink his company's place in the world. The new world is about "ruthless execution," as Amir Hartman states it in his book NetReady.

Most of the stories in this book are not specifically about implementing eBusiness strategies, but instead are about strategy implementation: how companies like AMFM Inc., GATX Terminals, and DSM Desotech put in new business strategies to deal with increased competition and speed -- and then how those companies worked to catapult new behavior. The same principles that guided these companies apply in today's world of ruthless execution.

There are stories about companies faced with the challenge and availability of new technologies -- and how those company leaders handled it. You'll read about Educational Testing Service coming to grips with how new computer-based testing would affect its entire organization. You'll hear how CCH, a ninety-year-old book publisher, moved its products onto software and the Internet. You'll read about the trials of two large banking companies, Synovus and Wachovia Bank, as they created online banks.

Although the initial goal was to help established companies make the transition to the new economy, eLeadership is not just for the traditional company. It's really about the kinds of leadership practices needed in the world we live in. And sometimes, though start-ups and dotcoms have fast-paced environments and stock options for everyone, the leaders sound and look and taste much like the leaders of the past. Having visited many start-ups, my experience is that there's a surprising amount of hierarchical behavior and old-line thinking in start-up companies. Once you get past the funky locations and pool tables, they can look just like any Industrial Age company, with employee cubicle size determined by rank. In fact, it's my impression that start-ups are finding themselves working hard to protect the cachet of the dotcom world -- sometimes at the expense of their environment.

Oakleigh Thorne, who lead the re-creation of CCH, now is a venture capitalist involved with several startup companies. "What amazes me about these new companies is how they too have to change their culture," he says. "People can become

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743204387
• ISBN 13: 9780743204385
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256