EPowerment

I am delighted to announce the title of a new book that I am working on with 10 other wonderful co-authors. The title is EPowerment – a combination of three E terms.

The first E is Empowerment – I was first exposed to the term Empowerment in the early 90s – and it quickly became a powerful term for the noble transference of decision-making down the food chain. By allowing every employee to make decisions at the time decisions need to be made, in lieu of going through the proverbial red tape bureaucracy, great efficiencies could be realized. I loved the idea as a relatively young professional at the time. Though the intent and the concept were great, there were some shortcomings of Empowerment as few models of exactly “how to” do it were available.

The letter E in front of some major business terms like commerce (E-commerce) or popular books like Emyth brought forth the idea of electronic communications through electronic platforms and media. This became very popular in the late 90s and even after the dot com bust. Clearly the trend towards E communication only exponentially grew. It was not until this decade that the number of devices has super-exponentially grown (over 14 billion devices will exist in 2010 that can connect to the internet compared to less than 1 billion in 2000). Not only are there more devices, but there now is a place for all the devices to connect to – the internet and with Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies already incredibly popular, the devices allow for unprecedented levels of communication and connection. This is the second E.

The third and final E should be easy to guess – EQ! And it was not until this decade, after being introduced to the business community in the mid 90s, that extensive research and thought leadership has arisen. See my past posts to learn about the relevance of EQ to just about all the dimensions of both life and the workplace.

So the term EPowerment captures the elusive “how to” of empowerment. By leveraging technologies to connect in real time and focusing on EQ as experiences occur (emotions in real time), empowerment can finally be truly achieved. Empowerment has both tremendous personal impact (by increasing your EQ you can maximize all your other competencies) and tremendous business impact (by connecting with communities and knowledge sources, duplicating mistakes can be avoided, best practices can be leveraged in real time and better decisions can be made).

Our book will explore how people from all industries and cultures can EPower themselves to Empowerment by focusing on EQ using Electronic communication tools that allow for real-time and at the point-of-need learning. Over the next five weeks, I will discuss the Five Learning Principles to achieve EPowerment:

#1: Extended Learning Models
#2: Emotional Safety
#3: Outcome-Based Learning
#4: Mentoring
#5: Multi-Mode Learning