It was 1999 and I was on a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, a grueling 17 hour jaunt that always ends with dead laptop batteries and this feeling like you’ve been up all night on a plane; oh yeah, I was up all night on a plane. Just prior to my departure I caught an episode of King of Queens in the United Air Lines International Lounge. I was munching on some of those really nice snacks only available in the international lounge while working on my speaker notes for a series of presentations that lay ahead in 8 Australian cities. My presentations focused on programmer productivity through better configuration management practices, but it also touched on the nature of email and how software engineers can get out of synch using email as their primary collaboration infrastructure. Programmers (as smart as they may seem) swamp the productivity boat in a variety of ways and my trip was an evangelistic attempt to underscore the value of configuration management tools and sound development processes.
King of Queens was a CBS sitcom set in Queens, NY whose star, Doug Heffernan (played by Kevin James) lived with his wife (Carrie) and father-in-law (Arthur) under one roof. Arthur, played by veteran actor and comedian Jerry Stiller, was somewhat peculiar; his character was un-trusting and suffered from a serious case of paranoia. In this particular episode, Carrie mentions to Doug that it would be nice if he spent more time hanging out with Arthur in his basement suite – she encourages Doug, suggesting it might be fun to bond more with her father (Arthur). Doug retorts “Arthur’s room is where fun goes to die“. At that very instant, a useful theme for my lecture became obvious, and the title of this book was born. I mimicked the humor in this crafty statement and applied it to a completely different situation; ergo, Email is where knowledge goes to die. It became the cornerstone quote of my presentation in Australia and drew a good deal of press and significant positive feedback. Since then, Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) has also used Doug’s infamous and funny line and my own version can be found in many blogs and articles on the web.
Thank you CBS writers Michael J. Weithorn, David Litt, and David Bickel for an inspirational wind-shear that helped me understand a fundamental truth.
More important than the humor of this statement is how well people relate to it. Everyone agrees – email is a knowledge cul-de-sac – a dead end for valuable ideas – a graveyard of potential. Email is where corporate IQ kicks back and has a brewski. Email also contributes to corporate amnesia; forgetfulness that costs businesses millions – perhaps billions in repeated mistakes every year.
Email is also wasteful; threads grow with unending off-topic discussions and CC lists expand, eroding productivity in all corners of the enterprise. Indeed, email is a problem but imagine trying to do business without it. Even with the massive heat-loss from this antiquated and weak communications model, two things are clear; (i) no one has come up with a better approach that has challenged or displaced email, and (ii) it works pretty well in spite of its shortcomings. But there must be something better – that’s the subject of a book that I may someday write.
Hello Bill! Thanks ever so much for pointing me into this article and for putting together such a wonderful story! Now we all know where the famous quote on “Email is where knowledge goes to die” comes from! And all of that with a lovely touch of humour and good fun! Fabulous! Thanks for sharing it across!
With regards to one of your comments above RE: “(i) no one has come up with a better approach that has challenged or displaced email” allow me to challenge that one for a bit and share with your audience over here an initiative I have been running over the course of the last three years called “Living A World Without Email” (#lawwe), where during the course of that period I have managed to move over 95% of all of the email conversations I used to have into social software spaces.
To the point where there are only two different use cases / scenarios that still make me go back to email every now and then: 1) Calendaring and Scheduling (For meetings and conference calls) and 2) 1:1 confidential / sensitive conversations that should remain private (HR, Legal, IP Law kind of discussions). For the rest, it’s all out of my Inbox and into social spaces.
It’s been quite an experiment folks can follow over at A World Without Email, where I share some progress reports over the course of weeks. Latest one is a near wrap of last year where all in all I averaged 17 emails received per week, which is 2.4 emails received per day. I haven’t killed email just yet, but I think I have certainly managed to challenge it and displace it showing it’s no longer the King of Communication / Collaboration, but just one more option, and in most cases, perhaps not the better one… :)
Luis,
Your welcome and your efforts associated with A World Without Email are certainly noble and I’ve followed the progress. Indeed, it is possible to reshape communications processes to squelch (or quell more accurately) the absurd flow of email. However, as your experiment has shown, success doesn’t come easily. While shifting the bulk of communications to social systems may be a good approach for some, it’s probably not ideal for everyone. And with the fluidity of social networks and very low switching costs, one must ask – how sustainable is any strategy that places key communications archives out into the wild? And further, the fragmentation of communications content makes it all the more difficult to wrangle into one location for historical perspective, legal requirements, or knowledge management needs.
I get it though – you are trying to blaze a new trail and that’s good – actually great! Your experiment has already demonstrated many options and some very useful solutions to the tsunami of messages and the debilitating and high-friction atmosphere we casually adopt known as “email”. And there are some very good initiatives that have tried to make a dent in this problem – Gist is one example, but it’s now a RIM product so we can’t really depend on it as a pervasive idea or technology.
For now, I’m staying with my assertion in this article (which was penned more than three years ago BTW) – nothing has emerged that’s better. ;-)
[…] observation.Is it still true? Is it worse? Better? Different?(backstory of how the quote originated)https://ipadcto.com/2011/02/28/em… Add AnswerBIU @ Edit Link Text Show answer […]
Hi Bill! Thanks a bunch for the follow up and for the additional comments! Very insightful and surely right on the money! You surely present a good number of the challenges that lay ahead for a new paradigm in how we conduct business; however, I don’t think I am, or a whole bunch of the folks I know are following my initiative, the only ones. I am sure you may have seen it already, but, just recently, Atos Origin’s CEO commented on his blog how in three years time he expects his company to completely ditch corporate email in favour of social tools. Now, I am not sure whether they would succeed or not, but the fact they are challenging and questioning the validity of email as an effective communication and collaboration tool is something that I think should deserve some attention.
If they manage to succeed, they would surely be changing the game of how we interact online; they would prove it’s possible to live without corporate email, even for audits, tracking records, KM related tasks, etc. etc. And if that is the case it will mark the beginning of plenty of others joining in as well.
I plan to continue carrying out this particular initiative, as it has helped me achieved plenty of the stuff I know I wouldn’t have had otherwise without it. And looking into the near future with offerings such as Project Vulcan where email goes back to being a messaging and notification system I have high hopes that very very soon we will have something emerging that would be much better. Time will tell …
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