Charles Wang has been to E-mail hell, and returned to tell the tale. His journey there began innocently enough when, as chairman of Computer Associates International, a software company, he first heard how quickly his employees had embraced their new electronic-mail system. They were messaging one another like crazy. "I said, 'Wonderful,'" recalls Wang. "And I also said, 'Let's check into how people are using it.'"
But instead of a happily percolating E-mail culture, what had evolved was a behavioral nightmare. "It was a disaster," he says. "My managers were getting 200 to 300 E-mails a day each. People were so enamored of it they weren't talking to each other. They were hibernating, E-mailing people in the next cubicle. They were abusing it." In just a few years, Wang's high-tech communications system had gone quietly berserk.
To stop the insanity, Wang short-circuited the system, taking the astonishing step--considering what his $3.9 billion company does for a living--of banning all E-mails from 9:30 a.m. to 12 noon and from 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. These hours are now rigidly observed as a sort of electronic quiet time. Says Wang: "It worked wonderfully. People are walking the corridors again talking to other people."
So much for the E-mail revolution, which is now enslaving the desk jockeys it was supposed to free, creating communications problems (of all things) so new that they cannot be found in the pages of any management textbook. E-mail has warped corporate cultures and created variant strains of bosses who make E-mail the terror weapon of choice to subdue underlings and subvert rivals. E-mail has wasted years of executive time and gigabytes of computer memory covering corporate backsides or looking for lost keys.
And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example, 776 billion E-mail messages moved through U.S.-based computer networks. This year that number is expected to more than triple, to 2.6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again, to 6.6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses E-mail.
So why are people saying such bad things about these computer-borne text messages? Almost everyone agrees that E-mail is, first and foremost, a blessing. It is a convenient, highly democratic, informal medium for conveying messages that conforms well to human needs. E-mail is perhaps the ideal platform, for example, from which to run a global project. "It is one of the great innovations of the last 20 years," says Paul Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School. But Argenti and others also say it is a medium whose function is confusing, in part because the process is so easy and informal that people treat it as they do conversation. "It's a never-never land between talking on the phone and writing," says Argenti. But as informal as it may be, E-mail is writing and constitutes a permanent record, to the eternal delight of any number of plaintiff lawyers and special prosecutors. (Yes, your company reads your E-mail.) In that regard, E-mail is a bit like a conversation at the water cooler that can be instantly forwarded to 500 people. And because so much of human conversation is nonverbal, E-mail messages, especially critical or complex ones, can easily be misconstrued.