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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Something is very wrong with the world.

Every so often I have to visit the post office. For the past several years, every single interaction with a postal employee has been pleasant, professional, service-oriented, and efficient.

When you can’t count on the USPS to give you something to gripe about, what can you count on?

Not the e-mail tax the USPS supposedly wants to impose. That’s one of those ridiculous Internet myths that refuses to die. If you haven’t heard the news yet, Nixon privatized the postal service — it isn’t part of the government, hasn’t been for nearly three decades, and has no taxing authority.

You can always count on me, though. I gave many of you something to gripe about with my recent column on religion in the workplace. Hundreds of you sent e-mails … all untaxed … divided almost exactly in half between those who thought I was way out of bounds and those who thanked me for my stance. Among the letters were a few points that call for a bit more coverage:

  • Several readers figured when I said you shouldn’t bring your beliefs into the workplace I meant you literally have to leave them at home. You can no more leave your beliefs behind than you can a beer belly or your left knee. What you can do is keep them in your head, to guide your decisions and help you cope with the inevitable frustrations of corporate life.
  • During social interactions with friends, which do happen at the office, respectful exchanges of views are just fine, too. It’s pretty easy, though, for an exchange of views (“Here’s how we look at an issue like this — how about you?”) to slip into dangerous territory. Presenting your beliefs is one thing. Attacking those of others is quite another.
  • Another distinction that doesn’t seem sufficiently well understood is the difference between beliefs and opinions. It’s a belief when you cite an authoritative text. It’s an opinion when you debate observable facts and dissectable logic. Debates of fact and logic are always acceptable. They’re rarely persuasive, but that’s a whole different subject.
  • Several readers missed a crucial point about the job applicant who said he was a Christian: He was interviewing for a management position. A qualified manager would know that religious affiliation, along with marital status, age, ethnicity, or any other completely irrelevant topic that could bias a hiring decision, has no place in a job interview. It was this lack of professionalism, and bad judgment which should have disqualified him, not his Christianity. And hiring the guy because of his religion was discriminatory toward all of the other applicants — a definite no-no.
  • Several Muslim readers corrected my use of “Islamic”. The religion is Islam; adherents are Muslims. “Islamic” means “pertaining to Islam.” My thanks to all who wrote.
  • Several readers told me of disparaging comments made toward fundamentalist Christians. That hasn’t been my experience … I’ve mostly experienced the reverse, or maybe I’m less attuned to this kind or remark. Regardless, it’s no more appropriate to disparage fundamentalist Christians than to be disparaged by them. This is how a society polarizes, and how Yugoslavia happens. Don’t feel any need to be the first on your block to exacerbate this trend.
  • And finally, if this wasn’t completely clear in the first column … I’m not presenting my personal system of beliefs, insisting that you accept my views over all others. While the details will vary, the law — not Bob Lewis — requires managers to protect workers from experience threatening and harassing work environments, and with few exceptions precludes discriminatory hiring.

If you aren’t clear on your obligations, what’s allowed and disallowed, what it means to embrace diversity in the workplace, and the difference between toleration of others and mutual respect … chances are your employees are equally confused or more so. That’s not good.

So as a stopgap, until you can schedule diversity training, here’s a simple rule that will keep you out of trouble: Never generalize about identifiable groups of people.

And why would you want to, anyway? Marketing professionals learned long ago that the most effective messages are personalized. You should too. Whether it’s an insult or a compliment, your message will always be more effective, and appropriate, when it’s personal.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

“Machines don’t serve us, we serve them.”

This phrase was one of many repeated by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times from the Davos Conference recently. Normally a reasonable feller, I’m afraid Friedman got the point but missed its meaning.

The point? We’re on the verge of technology backlash. The irony of wireless technologies, designed to untether business professionals and executives from their desks, is that they increasingly tether these increasingly tense individuals to technology. Which is worse: Being tied to the inbox on your desk, or to your PDA, pager, cell phone and portable microwave?

At the Davos Conference, also known as the World Economic Forum, 1,000 of the world’s most influential people hear and discuss radically new ideas. Usually, a key focus is on what technology is going to do for us. Friedman reports that this year, participants worried more about what it’s doing to us. And that’s where the discussions missed the point.

What triggered a lot of this discussion is the need to be 24/7, always on, and always available so as not to be left behind. Many of the participants took this personally.

There’s no question that lots of business leaders and business-leader wannabes turn themselves into 24/7 always-on individuals. It is, to them, the price and burden of success, or so they say.

But is it, or is it simply a way to feel important? Keep in mind, these are the same people who complain about IT promoting technology for technology’s sake. Then they buy a WAP-enabled cell phone or sign up for wireless e-mail on their PDA, just because it’s available.

Friedman described a presentation by Microsoft researcher Linda Stone, who described a phenomenon she calls “continuous partial attention.” Most of us have been guilty of this at one time or another, reading our e-mail while talking to someone on the phone, and muting that conversation to answer our cell phones. Personal technologies are, of course, to blame.

Except, of course, that they aren’t. With apologies to Hamlet, the fault lies not in our technologies but in ourselves.

Continuous partial attention isn’t a new phenomenon. Back when the only personal information technology was the telephone, executives frequently accepted phone calls and scanned The Wall Street Journal while meeting with hapless supplicants. Technology may have democratized this form of bad manners, but it certainly didn’t invent it.

Another data point: I have, over the years, watched quite a few commuters reading their morning newspaper while driving during rush hour, and quite a few more putting on make-up. I much prefer those who talk on their cell phones — at least their eyes are pointed in the general direction of forward motion.

For those who think the new technologies require them to be available and alert at all times and in all situations, I offer the following: Didn’t you ever learn anything about the basic skills of management?

It’s quite true that increasingly, customers expect businesses to be available whenever they’re ready to buy something or need help with something they’ve already purchased. Except for banks (and someday they’ll figure it out, too), most businesses have found ways to accommodate this expectation, expanding availability by using automation, multiple shifts, and setting up operations in multiple time zones.

That’s whole businesses. Individuals who accommodate their need for extended availability by using personal technologies need to expand their repertoire. Among the alternatives: delegation, voice mail, e-mail, and not checking your messages until it’s convenient. Because while the number of situations that may require immediate attention may be very large, the number that require your immediate personal attention is very, very small. If that isn’t true — if you’re the only one who can deal with emergencies that may crop up at any moment — then there’s something very wrong with how you’ve organized your work.

The solution: Organize your work differently. And stop thinking you’re so essential to everything that you have to be continuously available.

Maybe, though, the problem really is with these new technologies. It may be that we need to make them more user friendly. In that spirit, here’s a suggestion to the designers of PDAs, cell phones, pagers, and everything else we carry around with us: Make the Off button bigger.

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