Be daring, be driven & be down to earth – Walk before you mail

Mails make us efficient we are told. But do mails make us better colleagues? Do mails make us better friends? Do mails make us more effective? We do not know. What we do know is that people like people more than their mails. So whenever possible, we have always tried to know a person before dashing off a mail to him or her. We believe it is our responsibility to know the person we are working with. How else can we work best together? We must also confess that it is not possible all the time, but every time that it is we must try and walk. We have actually measured – the time spent in writing a mid sized mail is more than the time taken to walk across to any of my colleagues in Hua Li building. However, to be fair to mails, we must also say that it is not the best comparison, because when you walk across you end up doing a lot more than just talk work – while it can be trashed as worthless talk or office banter but we believe it is vital none the less. The informal peer to peer exchange & relationship networks are more powerful that the formal lines of command in office.