A Tool for Guerrilla Warfare

Much has been said about the unintended consequences of e-mail, a subject inspiring countless articles by corporate communications experts on the fine points of e-mail etiquette. Less attention, however, is paid to the practice of using this so-called "killer app" to intentionally manipulate, smear, and expose one's adversaries on the corporate battlefield.

Wade Hyde, a communications consultant based in Dallas, says this may reflect the newness of e-mail as a business communications tool, but its application to political ends shouldn't come as a surprise.

"Guerrilla warfare in the corporate world has been around a long time," says Hyde. "What e-mail does is make it easier to fight those battles. Just punch a button and it's done."

Of course, e-mail is just a tool, and an incredibly useful one at that. Compare e-mail, for example, to the old inter-office memo, a cumbersome device used mainly by upper management to communicate major announcements to the rank and file. Each message usually went through several steps -- dictation, writing, editing -- before being delivered by hand to its recipients.

E-mail, in contrast, is quick and dirty. It can be sent from anywhere on the network, at all times of day or night, by a single person. It is generally not edited or, for that matter, proofread, and it doesn't require human intervention to reach its intended audience. As a result, it's much faster to create and distribute.

"Communications before e-mail was a much more synchronous process," says Steven M. Layne, founder and chairman of United Messaging, which outsources e-mail services to large corporations and government agencies. "It tended to be more one to one. I call you, we talk and you listen to me. Or we have a meeting. E-mail has fundamentally changed the physics of interpersonal communications. You write it, you send it, boom -- it's there."

Yet these same advantages -- speed, ease of use, asynchronicity -- can be exploited for less than honorable purposes.

The Phantom Employee

Several years ago, Cameron Brown, a communications consultant, saw how e-mail enabled a clever co-worker to pretend that he was working hard late at night, even though he was really out socializing with his friends.

"He was an utterly shameless self-promoter, but he was very crafty about it," says Brown, who worked at the time as an associate media director for NASDAQ in New York.

The co-worker routinely left early from work to meet friends for dinner. Later in the evening, he would come back to the office to send out a few e-mails.

"People would assume he had been working all that time, but he was basically just sending off e-mails," says Brown. "He was one of the lazier people there."

The Suicide Bomber

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of e-mail is the fact that it is so incredibly simple to use. With almost no effort, you can send a message to anyone from the CEO on down the corporate ladder, and you can do it from the privacy of your office or cubicle. This instant access has had a certain democratizing effect within companies, but minus the face-to-face contact it can also create the illusion of anonymity, emboldening the sender to take liberties and say in e-mail what he wouldn't say in person.

So it was for Russ Pitts, an employee at TechTV, a San Francisco-based television network, who sent a stinging e-mail to the entire company when he quit his job as associate producer in February.

"Boy how these past two years have flown by! It seems like only seven hundred and forty-five days since I first walked through these doors," his e-mail began. "Then, I was a relatively inexperienced young man, fresh off the bridge, with dreams of breaking into the fast, glittering world of Technology Television. Now, as you all are probably aware, I couldn't care less if the entire building spontaneously filled with eagle semen."

The e-mail went on to detail the many ways in which Pitts was happy to be leaving the company, which had suffered through waves of layoffs, canceled shows and other problems. "Looking back over all I've done here at TechTV, I truly don't think any of it would have been as mediocre as it was without the constant discouragement, confusion and the droning, incessant obnoxiousness of you, my fellow employees," he wrote. "Many the rosy fingered dawn has found me kneeling in front of the toilet, vomiting forth my meager breakfast at the thought of walking through these doors yet one more time."

He closed by telling other employees to "get out while you can." The message, said one fellow worker, "caused quite a stir around the office." It was eventually posted on Fuckedcompany.com, where it remains in one of several long threads of venomous message-board submissions regarding the company at the site's Super Happy Fun Slander Corner.

Pitts, who is now pursuing a career as a playwright in Boston, says he had been planning to leave TechTV for six months prior to giving notice. During that time, he was "boiling over" with frustration about his job, his boss, and what he perceived as the companys backstabbing corporate culture. At one point, he ended up in the hospital for a month with a stomach ailment from work-related stress.

Sending the e-mail was the last thing he did before leaving the building the day he resigned. "My hand was shaking when I clicked the send button. I was really nervous. I felt like I was confronting everybody in the company. It was as if I was on stage in front of all 600 people on the [corporate] network."

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