The Email Curtain
More and more, I see people hiding behind e-mail. If you don’t have the guts to say it in person, don’t send it in an e-mail. What do you think?
In general, we’d rank e-mail right up there as one of the great, transformative innovations of all time in that you can say: “It changed everything.” E-mail has made business faster, more competitive, and more global. It has opened up whole new ways of working and conducting commerce. Indeed, just recall that day recently when BlackBerrys went offline due to a technological snafu. For 24 hours, the business world was forced to remember life before instant information and communication. No one felt nostalgic. They felt helpless.
That said, you’re definitely right that e-mail allows people to deliver hard messages from a distance, like throwing a punch from another room. We don’t know the antidote for that dynamic, except for each person to fight it personally by asking, “Should I say this face-to-face?” before pushing the send button. If you feel squeamish, the answer is yes. Hard as it is, stop typing—and start talking instead.
This question and answer originally appeared in Business Week magazine on June 25, 2007.
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