Skip to main content

No 3rd "Flamemail" Rule

Image
By
NEN's Srikrishna has provides a simple rule to nip flame wars conducted over email in the bud (emphasis mine):
Most back-and-forth email stinkers or flame wars are preventable and many times seem downright silly or petty. Yet they seem to pop up all over the place with near-despairing regularity. Flame wars, particularly between colleagues, is a huge emotional sink, sapping productivity and motivation. This is even truer when the parties involved are in the same office. It is to overcome these that we’ve formulated a simple rule – yep 1 single rule to prevent email flame wars.

The No 3rd email rule Simply put this rule states, if one person has sent an email (#1) and a second person has responded (#2) and it’s clear that they are not agreeing, or not happy – there should be no 3rd email sent. Instead the two parties should talk in person (sometimes this only requires swivelling in one’s chair) or pick up the phone, if not in the same office.
Think about it – most email flaming starts due to one of two reasons:

public questioning, accusation or challenge (real or perceived) by usually the sender
outright misunderstanding by one party (usually the reader)

Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

How I Raised Funding - Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry

By
You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this  interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more arti...
Read more

How Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems

By
While I knew the one line description "Vinod Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and was earlier part of the founding team at Daisy Systems", I hadn't come across a more detailed version of Khosla's pre-KPCB exploits before Joe Kraus talked about it on his blog . Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that I found interesting: How a Stanford secretary "linked up" SUN's co-founders: I'm probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the uame of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim. Apparently,...
Read more