"I pick up my phone, and some 30-year-old starts yelling at me," sputters the executive, whose indignation brings him out of his chair. "I find it incomprehensible that people can operate this way. They're screaming monsters. Brats!"
The executive is in his late forties and running a hot e-business where he cultivates a collegiality not always shared by clients and associates outside the company. He's a savvy pro with the energy of a 30-year-old himself who walks the walk, dresses in Friday casual all week, and would never be confused with the old economy. Yet, he's offended by the brashness resounding through the technological land and the sense that rudeness is OK, even encouraged."The Internet shouldn't be any different from any other business," he says. "We're not curing cancer here."
He works on the front lines of the culture clash, where his complaint resonates as deeply as it offends. To e-culture boosters, and there are many, such gripes are an exaggeration, or sour grapes, or a misreading of the speed and intensity required by anyone -- young, old, or in-between -- who wishes to succeed.
"They're in a race," says Steve Schwartz, cofounder of Schwartz Communications, which does public relations for many of the entrepreneurs driving the economic boom. "They've got a radar lock on their goals. I find that exhilarating."
No, they don't always return phone calls the way their predecessors did 10 or 15 years ago. "No return means 'I'm not interested, but I don't have the time to call you to tell you I'm not interested,' " Schwartz explains. "That's becoming acceptable."
Not to Judy Bowman, head of Protocol Consultants International in South Hamilton, Mass., purveyor of civility to the corporate world.
"There is no excuse for not returning a call," she says. "With voice mail, you can always call back and leave a message when you know someone is at lunch, and at least get credit for trying."
But even expedient politeness takes time. And when a business can mature in weeks, and when fortunes can be made or lost in minutes, niceties are no longer a priority in many quarters. The business world speaks in the shorthand of the zone known as "Internet time," where too much is happening too fast and often all at once: e-mail, faxes, IPOs, mergers, acquisitions, growth, relationships that once took years to build, and decisions that once required at least a night's sleep.
While entrepreneurs have always been hard-driving, today's crop is pressing even harder because of this pace and the competition, also proliferating at warp speed.
"It's ready, fire -- aim!" says David Blohm, describing decisionmaking in the year 2000.
Blohm is president and CEO of SmarterKids.com, an online educational store with headquarters in Needham, Mass.. Blohm, who founded another company in the mid-1980s, says the atmosphere today is "significantly more stressful." He doesn't see this as rudeness, but simply the way business is done.
But is there a cost -- if not for Blohm, who's a success, then for the up-and-comer straining to reach the top?
"People are out of control," says an entrepreneur who founded his first businesses 20 years ago and now runs an online financial services company. "There used to be a line between aggressive and obnoxious. I think that line has been moved. There is so much money being put down now and the stakes are so much higher that this is driving people to do things in business they might not do in their personal lives."
He finds that business relationships are short-term. "Somebody will be red-hot to work with you, and when the project is over, that's it. You never hear from them again."
A business school administrator who mentors entrepreneurs says they have little time for friendships:
"These are people who sleep in the office. What you hear about is the 50 percent who make it. But there's the 50 percent who don't make it. Everybody's going to the Indy 500, but nobody's looking at those crashes on the side of the road."
He feels that "some people are trading off their souls." He asks the question that might well become a bumper sticker for this economic age: Is the money worth it?