Just an FYI, for those of you who haven't been there:
Complaining to the CEO of a company is not an effective strategy
unless what you're trying to accomplish is a short-term reduction
of your blood pressure. What happens if you complain directly to
the boss is either:
1) It gets seen, and a massive, inefficient firedrill is
begun, which eats up lots of everyone's time, and produces
a short-term solution applying to that given moment in time
and next time you have the same problem you'll discover
it isn't fixed.
2) It gets ignored, and your blood pressure just goes up
another notch. One day, someone finds you swelled with
rage like a bloated tick, and calls the bomb squad to
detonate you safely.
Any company that puts its CEO at the top rank of sales
support is going to be a bit micromanaged. :) Bill Gates, for
example, is a Pretty Busy Guy. I'm sure his shareholders would
rather have him building value for the company than wading
through firewalls @
greatcircle .
com .
I know I would. :) Some CEOs
read their own Email, many others have a secretary that forwards
it to a nondescript mailbox, or print it for reading on a plane.
In this wIrEd world, it's seen as a sign of hipness to avoid
paper, but the fact is that paper's mightly portable and there's
lots of paper bandwidth.
I find it ironic that someone would complain that when
they try to reach Security Dynamics, everyone was at N+I, but
there's an expectation that the CEO will read his Email. :) What
happens is it's no longer "we're all at N+I" it's now "we're
all reading our Email" -- recognize that in today's environment,
time is *THE* most important resource anyone has, and stop getting
insulted when someone doesn't drop everything to take care of
every low-priority interrupt that comes along. When we did the
whitehouse.gov thing, there were a lot of folks who seemed to
have the idea that Bill Clinton actually read all his Email!
And they expected replies! Imagine, the CEO of the most important
company (albeit not a profitable one) on the planet, and he's
expected to spend all his time reading Email? I hope not, guys,
that's not what we're paying them the big $$ for.
Another way of thinking about the Email-to-the-CEO thing
is that you *MAY* have the unique experience of having a second
of a multibillionaire's time as Bill Gates reads your mail and
thinks, "what a putz" as he deletes it.
mjr.
--
Chief Scientist, V-ONE Corporation -- "Security for a connected world"
work http://www.v-one.com
personal http://www.clark.net/pub/mjr/mjr-top.html
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