Global/Multicultural
References Work Place Case
June 22, 1994
John Sculley, Apple Computer Inc.'s ex-chairman, tells his pals to fax - not e-mail-important messages.
Denise Caruso, an oft-quoted computer pundit, recently removed her e-mail address from her business card. "I don't want people to get that close," she says.
One computer executive even shuts down his company's e-mail system for half the work day - he finds it unproductive.
But top executives and other Very Important People are finding that an unguarded e-mail address is like a published phone number: It encourages irksome contact from the electronic masses. Last year, for example, critics blitzed William Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., with protest e-mail after the company fired an employee who used his Microsoft e-mail address to launch broadsides against Ukrainian Communists. More recently, when the New Yorker published Mr. Gates's e-mail address in a profile, more than 5,000 messages poured in. This is about as profound as they got: "I fervently believe that the key to immortality is living a life worth remembering."
Indeed, one of the problems is that e-mail doesn't always live up to its early promise as a tool providing instant communication of vital or worthy information. Instead, in many cases, it has become a phenomenal way to communicate trivia, says Mitch Kertzman, chairman of Powersoft Corp. Among hundreds of messages Mr. Kertzman got last week: a note to all employees from a worker seeking to sell a dog. If not for the advice of lawyers and psychologists, a number of the software company's e-mail abusers "would've been caned a long time ago," he says.
"E-mail is part of the whole.movement to 24-hour accessibility," says John Staudenmaier, a historian of technology at the University of Detroit. "It's disgusting, way too much. It leads to an overload that will spawn a backlash." Lashing back at immoderate e-mailers, Andrew Grove, Intel Corp.'s chief executive officer, pointedly tells subordinates to stop copying him on inane material. WordPerfect's Mr. Rietveld, who gets up to 150 e-mail messages a day, has ordered employees not to broadcast nonessential memos like notices of softball practices.
But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures. Charles Wang, chairman of software giant Computer Associates International Inc., no longer sends or reads e-mail - though his company sells an e-mail software package. Mr. Wang also shuts down the company's e-mail system for five hours a day so employees can get some work done. "As a leader in a company, you have to go to an extreme to demonstrate a point," he says. With subordinates copying their bosses on practically every memo they write, "It's become a cover-your-ass tool," Mr. Wang adds.
Productivity aside, many CEOs secretly fear unbridled e-mail is just too democratic, says Langdon Winner, a political scientist and social critic at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. "E-mail is a powerful tool to promote communication and flatten hierarchies," Mr. Winner says. "But what nobody wants to admit is that people in an organization have different amounts of power and status. And that those who are better off want to restore a degree of isolation."
Microsoft's Mr. Gates, an unabashed e-mailer, uses special software - a "bozo filter" in cyber-slang- that culls mail from strangers and sends it into an electronic archive, where the mail sits unless he searches for it. The filter is programmed so that only mail from Microsoft employees, or from Mr. Gates's high-profile friends like Tom Brokaw, gets through. (It apparently works: He hasn't responded to a year's worth of e-mail messages from this reporter.)
But it didn't filter out Connie Chung. Mr. Gates agreed to an interview on her "Eye-to-Eye" show partly because he was impressed that she e-mailed her interview request. Mr. Gates walked out of the recent interview Tonya Harding-style, though, when Ms. Chung pressed him with irritating questions. She also kept pronouncing MS-DOS, a core Microsoft product, as "dos," the Spanish word for two. This might have all been avoided had Mr. Gates learned from the network that an aide to Ms. Chung, and not Ms. Chung herself, sent the e-mail message.
Of course, there are those who can't get enough e-mail. One such addict is Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems Inc., whose 13,000 employees e-mail an astonishing 1.5 million messages a day. As if the 200 electronic messages that land in Mr. McNealy's e-mailbox on a busy day aren't enough, Mr. McNealy even sends himself e-mail. A recent missive: "Scott your fiancee's birthday is next Friday. Don't forget, dummy."