GABA Panel on Communication Wrap Up

I had mentioned that I was going to be on a panel at a GABA event on “Communications Today: Blogs, Email Etiquette and More” that was held tonight at SAP on Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto. It addressed a broad theme with four speakers (Jennifer Lankheim was a no show) from fairly different backgrounds in front of an intimate audience of about 35. E. J. Dieterle, the CEO of YES Partners was the moderator and he asked a couple of “show of hands” background questions of the audience. Most folks were consultants who found perhaps 50 new e-mails a day in their inbox. I handed out a hard copy of our new article Blogs & Wikis for Better Collaboration.

Panelists on Electronic Communication All Bring Paper Handouts

It was funny that on a night where we focused on electronic communication each of the other three panelists also put a handout on the attendees chairs, the “paperless consultant” proved as mythical as the “paperless office” seems as distant (or as close) as it did in 1975 when Business Week was writing about “The Office of the Future” (remember that? they are still at it almost 30 year later, writing in 2004 about “Sneak Peeks at Tomorrow’s Office“).

A Blog is Just a Content Management System For Your Website

Because of the broad nature of the topic we never really got much of a conversation going. I stuck to my position that the best way for most people–especially consultants and very small firms–to think of a blog is just a better way to manage your website. Write about things that are of interest or use to your customers and prospects, include frequently asked questions since most folks will check your website before they call you, and pick a pace that you can continue on a sustained basis.

Pierre Khawand, CEO of People-OnTheGo made the point that blogs are useful in larger firms and enterprises for internal communication [update Oct-10 he blogs in more detail on his “Less is More Blog.”]

Most Questions Related to Managing Email

But the problem that many folks seemed to be wrestling with was e-mail overload. One of the best articles on this remains Ole Eichorn’s “The Tyranny of E-mail” from 2003, which covers everything the panel could suggest (“don’t answer your e-mail as frequently, send shorter e-mails, pick up the phone if you find tempers rising or discussions moving in circles”) and more. I shared some of my challenges in E-mail overload back in November (and no, it hasn’t gotten any better and I haven’t gotten any smarter, except that it’s now clear I have to move off of Eudora since support has been completely discontinued…suggestions welcome, clues gratefully accepted).

It was an enjoyable evening. My thanks to Jennifer Vessels of Next Step Growth for introducing me to E. J. Dieterle who then allowed me to take part, and to Caroline Raynaud, the President of GABA, for orchestrating an enjoyable evening.

Related Blog Posts

• GABA Panel on Communications Today: Blogs, Email Etiquette and More
• How do Blogs and Wikis Help Me Collaborate with My Customers?
• E-mail overload

Postscript from Malcom Gladwell’s “Social Life of Paper” some key take-aways:

• Paper enables a certain kind of thinking.
• What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles — piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t.
• The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top.
• Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.
• But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking.
• This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we have historically thought about the stuff.
• Mica Endsley: “Situation awareness operates on three levels. One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means — analogous to reading comprehension. Third is projection the ability to predict the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”