The Entire Point Of Work EMail Is To Reinforce The Existing Hierarchy

And no, Slack has not yet saved us.

Before we get into this, let’s just be clear up front: e-mail is probably one of the worst things mankind has wrought upon us.

There’s a ton of topics in the general ‘working world’ that we never discuss, but should discuss — because those topics pretty much define everything that happens between people in cubicles and offices. The most notable example is failure; that happens every second in most offices, and yet, we often decide to gloss it over with a new, cheapened success metric. Another is collaboration — it’s the essence of the human experience, right? Thing is, not a soul wants to actually collaborate at the office. A third one (there’s hundreds) would be communication; everyone runs around claiming that it’s essential, yet most people are lip-servicing the concept.

Here’s another one. Darden (UVA) business school professors are smarter people than I am, so I’ll let their wording ring this one out:

Thomas-Hunt and her co-authors, Oliver J. Sheldon and Chad A. Proell, were “interested in the ways collaborations go awry, or don’t reach their full potential,” she says. There was…