It seems the human capacity to harness e-mails is somewhat less than that of herding butterflies. Once out of the cocoon, they can never be returned and rarely squashed. Poetically, they are Hiawatha's arrows, though often poison-tipped.
Even so, the Internet is man's best friend in the technological age. Imagine Benjamin Franklin's difficulty communicating the attitude of parliament to those uppity colonists when a single letter took six weeks to arrive, assuming the ship had blue skies and strong winds the entire journey. Now it takes no time, seeming to travel with the speed of a hummingbird's wing.
If the Internet is down these days, we become like guppies desperately gasping for air. We have no sense of delayed gratification. That which is available 24/7 keeps us tethered to computer screens. One can only imagine a Darwin evolution several thousand years from now, with modern man having a curved spine, perhaps six fingers on each hand and, of course, built-in eye-screens to ward off the glare. The computer has replaced the television for nightly entertainment. We send some 30 million e-mails a day. From a sociological view, it has made the modern family unit even more estranged.
In today's family, a computer has become nearly as personal as a toothbrush. In my own clan of four, we have five computers. My five-year-old daughter is not a proficient reader as yet, though she plays a computer like it's a Steinway grand, initiating dozens of software commands that bring to her a world of imagination. My 13-year-old? God knows what she is doing since her door is generally shut, but I do hear the gentle tapping of keys. She has been warned, of course, of the 60-year-old lothario pretending to be a lovesick teenager.
The Internet represents both the greatest benefit and the greatest challenge to civil communication since the invention of the telephone. It has brought the art of letter writing back into style-well, almost. Often, our communications - even in the business world- are like guttural sounds offered up by those North Georgia hillbillies in the movie, Deliverance.
One small point, but let's put it on the table. Every so often "emoticons" and "smiley faces" will creep into a business communication, sort of like some viral infection that, once spread, suggests the sender is a pre-teen girl in pigtails. They don't belong there, especially the kind that bounce around through cyberspace. Words are meant to emote, not silly icons.
E-mails have hair-triggers, and can create a kind of stealth warfare. They zing back and forth, often carrying vitriolic language that one would never use in a face-to-face conversation without blood being drawn. This is particularly troublesome when it comes to different time zones around the world. I have known someone in Kyiv to fire off a particularly rabid email to his supervisor in New York, only to have second thoughts about its content as the sun was coming up over America seven hours later.
By that time, of course, the nasty missile is hanging in the air like stale cigar smoke, just waiting to be inhaled by a boss who has been locked in a morning traffic jam for the last two hours and has yet to have his second cup of coffee.
E-mails are also like horror movies: the slasher is never really dead. The darn killer is dealt a supposed fatal blow, but somehow revives to scare the daylights out of you at least twice more in the same movie. And then there are the sequels.
How would you feel if your most hateful, most private, most intimate, most embarrassing e-mail - the ones you thought had been whisked away to e-mail heaven with a keystroke - were to be printed on the front page of the New York Times?
Have you ever written anything to a friend that you would prefer your girlfriend or wife not read? Have you ever suggested a company position in an e-mail that, if it became public, could be misinterpreted, causing your firm to lose millions in a lawsuit? Have you ever let fling an off-color or politically incorrect joke, or simply forwarded one? Have you ever entered a chat room, the one labeled "Married, But Looking," just out of sheer curiosity?
Is that Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes knocking at your door?
Quick, who's the most important person in your business organization? No, you ninny, not the CEO. It's the network manager, the IT guy.
He is like the title character in the 1940s radio serial, The Shadow. He knows everything. He has access to your innermost thoughts and those of your co-conspirators, those carnal literary eruptions, those flighty semi-flirting notes to a co-worker, those mundane reminders to pick up a quart of milk on the way home. As for those proprietary business secrets - things like salaries, bonuses, commendations, reprimands, balance sheets and so forth - yep, you guessed it,
the network manager has the combination to the safe.
The good news is the network manager generally doesn't care. Probably the most overworked employee in the office, he has his hands full just managing the network and keeping the flow of communication going. There is something to be said that the person who has access to all the information has access to none.
There are far too many megabytes of useless tripe to wade through to get to your daily secrets. And, generally, the network manager, having the power to bring down the kingdom, is so secure in his position that he avoids the bureaucratic wrangling that comes with executive positions.
He is, indeed, a different sort of fellow. In today's technical world, if he is not God, he is a god.
This column is excerpted from Mike Willard's new book, The Gorilla Manager: A Reality Check. It will be released in Fall 2005.
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