"You've Got Mail"

Despite the convenience of e-mail, face-to-face meetings remain crucial for successful communication within organizations. Relying exclusively on e-mail can present big risks.

Executive Summary
I’ll begin with a story that I was told by an MBA alumnus some years ago and that I first recounted in an article for a previous issue of the magazine (September 2000). It demonstrates the limitations of e-mail and forms the basis for the observations set out below, indicating one of the ways that we can prevent our misunderstandings from escalating.

“It happened at my first job, after I had graduated from a university technical course and had been employed as project engineer for a U.S. multinational. My job was to implement an industrial project in my own country, working in parallel with two other project engineers, one in the U.S. and the other in Canada. They were both highly experienced professionals and had been with the company for some years. This was my first project at the company, which I had joined only three weeks earlier. I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to establish any relationships with other people in the company and the only thing I knew about my colleagues from across the Atlantic was their names.”

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