No take-backs on angry e-mails Never pick a fight with someone through e-mail. I had a boss once who taught me a very important lesson that I have followed throughout my business career. We had a difficult client who needed to be told where to stuff it. I suggested that we write him a letter. “I never write an angry letter to anyone because he’ll just write one back,” my boss told me. I had to let that advice sink in a bit but the more I thought about it the more I understood his wisdom. This was the days before e-mail. Now it is so easy to zip off an angry comment, criticism or diatribe via e-mail that it’s really dangerous. It’s just a click of the mouse and it’s gone. There’s no getting it back. At least in the old days, you might calm down a bit while preparing the letter and envelope and then letting it sit awhile in the out basket. You had some time to think it over. I thought about this recently when I received a “snippy” e-mail from a much younger business associate. I mention the difference in our ages for two reasons: 1) I think the younger generation is more prone to using e-mail because they have grown up with it; and 2) she did not have benefit of business experience to know better. That being said, I’ve been on the wrong end of e-mail wrath from older people as well who should know better. One of those situations involved a person who I consider a friend. We had unintentionally ended up on opposite sides of a legitimate business argument and one thing led to another. Before long we were zipping nasty e-mails back and forth when I realized that we had a much better chance of working this out just by picking up the telephone. Mike knew why I had called. “Jim, what are we doing? We know each other well enough to talk this out.” Which we did, all settled in 3 minutes. We felt so good afterwards we went out to lunch together. USING CAPITAL LETTERS in your e-mail is the way you really let someone know that you are mad. I recently got a letter from one of our publishing partners in which she used CAPITAL LETTERS to make a very strong point. I figured she was mad at me. After all, CAPITAL LETTERS are akin to shouting on an e-mail. We had a face-to-face meeting two weeks later. I asked her: “why are you mad at me,” I asked. “I’m not mad at you. I was just trying to make a point,” she told me. The problem with e-mail is that you can’t express voice tone or body language. All you can do is write in CAPITAL LETTERS. I’m sure someone has included this sort of advice in a modern manual on office courtesies. If not, then maybe I should write that book. ## I just returned from the Annual Convention of the Alliance of Area Business Publications that was held in Charleston, South Carolina. This annual gathering of publishers and editors is an orgy of great ideas. The frustrating part is that by the end of the year you are lucky if you are able to employ 2 out of 10. But, usually those 2 ideas easily pay for the conference and your annual membership dues several times over. Generally speaking our industry has continued to perform well financially despite the general malaise of the newspaper industry and the melt-down that we’ve seen here in Chicago with the Tribune and the Sun Times. The area business publication niche is only about 30 years old so in many ways we are still a growth industry. One sign of changing times, however, was conference session that I was in with editors who were asked by a show of hands: “in tens years how many of you think your core product will be your print newspaper…or your on-line product?” On-line won the unscientific poll of editors about two to one. Contact publisher Jim Elsener at jelsener@thebusinessledger.com or at 630-428-8788.

Posted on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 (Archive on Tuesday, July 08, 2008) Posted by jstoltz  Contributed by jstoltz

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