When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
'When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.' I've heard and been using this expression for 20 years. It's one of my favorites and you can apply it to just about anything. I believe I first heard the expression when I was actually using a hammer. I used to work summers while I was in college in construction, doing roofing and siding. Back then we did use our hammer for everything. Need a piece of wood strapping shortened, just hit it with the claw end of a hammer enough and the piece would fall off. It saves the time of going down a ladder when you are 30 feet up in the air. If you needed some flashing or lead bent, just hit it with the hammer a few times till it conformed to the shape you needed it to be. I had a colorful boss who was full of one liners and his way of imparting knowledge was usually to threaten you with what he called his '28 ounces of persuasion'. So, when you have a hammer everything can be your nail. I think most people get the true meaning and employ this theory everyday in their lives. Adapt what you know to what you need.
In Corporate America email has become the hammer. Think about how we use email today. Big deal closes, send an email. Birth announcement, send an email. Food leftover in the conference room, send an email. This one is my personal favorite since I've worked remotely for a number of companies and would really like one of those chocolate chip cookies. Instead I'm left wanting. For the most part these are the emails you don't care about and I'm sure there have been studies done that show how many useless emails a person gets per day/week/month and how many years of their lives are wasted reading them. There are also those emails that you do care about. Examples, want to schedule a meeting with a couple of people? Send an email to the group and then sit back and watch the emails come flying in as everyone let's you know what days and times do and don't work for them. The number of emails is exponential to the number of people that will be in the meeting. Another fun one is to put a document together and email to a bunch of people for their comments. There's nothing more fun then trying to figure out how to consolidate all of those changes. Last but not least, how about the email that we send to someone that is composed of one sentence, or a sentence fragment or even one word. Think about it, you've done it. To: Joe@mycompany.com Lunch?
I think you get the point.
We could blame it on mailing lists. We could even ban the dreaded all@mycompany.com mailing list. We could blame it on the fact that we have evolved into a society that shuns the use of inter-personal communication, opting instead to compose and fire off an email to get the simplest question answered, even when it would be quicker to pick up the phone and hit a 4-digit extension and speak to the person. The problem is we still have a need to communicate the information and receive feedback in the course of our daily work. The answer lies in current and new technologies and the adequate training needed for them. Document management systems, shared calendaring and even IM have been around for quite some time. Wikis, Blogs and RSS are making their inroads. It's going to take some time but eventually corporations will adequately train their employees and users will figure out that there are easier ways of communicating then just email. Until that happens though, just make sure you send me an email if there are any leftover cookies in the conference room.
