Mass e-mailing as a defensive weapon in the workplace
From the best practice entries on this blog you may be getting the impression that I am recommending you stop mass e-mailing. Well not quite! There is one situation that I recommend to all my students: using mass e-mails as a defensive weapon in the workplace. The business schools tell you that companies are full of rational people, all with unified aims. Reality check! Many are liars, cheats, fools, incompetents, psychopaths, all with their own agendas. Never take any of their verbal statements at face value, immediately note it down in an e-mail, and send it straight back to them (and others, as witnesses), asking for clarification. Now it’s on the record. Use e-mails to pass the buck – proof that wrongdoing lies elsewhere.
Set up mass mailings and audit trails that cover your back. Always ensure that all commitments or agreements are conditional – practice the art of plausible deniability. The organizational chart doesn’t identify responsibility, only authority. The buck doesn’t stop here – with authority – it stops anywhere you can dump it. The hot potato of responsibility ends up with the poor sap at the end of an audit trail. When blame is flying around, use e-mails to make sure it doesn’t end with you – because believe me, that’s just what the other guy is doing.
Take the scandal of the Shell oil reserves, where senior executives tried to blame one another for misrepresenting the level of reserves. Chairman Sir Phillip Watts blamed the head of exploration, Walter van de Vijver, who in turn produced an e-mail he had sent to Watts in November 2003, saying “I am becoming sick and tired about lying about the extent of our reserves.” E-mail as a smoking gun. Both men bit the dust. But it got worse: the SEC fined Shell $120 million, and the FSA hit them for £17 million.
Once an e-mail is out there, you can never get it back. It’s no good asking IT staff to destroy the evidence. They have more sense than to get sucked into a conspiracy. Destruction of documents be they paper, photographic or electronic is now an admission of guilt – and you can never be sure there isn’t a residue somewhere in the system; however, keep the documents and any litigant has the right to gain legal access. My advice is never put anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see; but anything you want the world to see put in an e-mail, and they will see it!
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