On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email

Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]:<p>&gt; RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we&#x27;ve seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that?<p>&gt; JA: Well, I think that&#x27;s very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00...</a>

&gt; Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring &quot;yes,&quot; &quot;no&quot; and &quot;thank you.&quot;<p>I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.<p>And the dividing line doesn&#x27;t necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law.<p>Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn&#x27;t.<p>Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again.<p>You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.

My first job was at an investment bank. I was taught very early on that I needed to watch what I said in my emails. I&#x27;m not sure if it was true or not, but someone told me that every month, someone from compliance looked over a random selection of my emails and my manager would have been informed if they found something wrong.<p>What everyone on Wall Street appreciates is that your emails are a permanent record and should be treated accordingly. When there&#x27;s a real risk that your emails will later turn up in court, you are gonna be a lot more careful about what you say. Even things that seem innocuous when you write them may not look good if they come under the spotlight later (something like &quot;Hey John, the code in that repo looks messy...&quot; may come back to bite you if it turns up in court). So I was taught to always keep to facts in emails rather than opinions (&quot;this data set has 246 invalid phone numbers and 20 fake email addresses&quot; is a fact... &quot;this data looks messy&quot; is an opinion subject to all sorts of interpretation later).<p>You might think that there&#x27;s nothing that you have to hide. If that&#x27;s true, then by all means, say what you want in your _personal_ email. But when you are using your company email, remember that you don&#x27;t have many rights to privacy there and so treat it accordingly.

&quot;His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review&quot;<p>A desire to filter out noise and apply their attention in a selective manner is probably the biggest motivation to avoid email. At this level, I imagine people would like to receive a concise written or spoken summary, think about the content, discuss it with the relevant people and then make a decision. Since they control their own time, and have staff to respond to &quot;tactical emergencies,&quot; they&#x27;re free to organize their schedule and staff in order to optimize the decision-making process.

&gt; Dimon volunteered: &quot;Don&#x27;t send emails after you&#x27;ve had a drink.&quot;<p>good advice for everyone, not just bankers and politicians.

Its incredible how there&#x27;s all this email related stuff in the press and not one word about email encryption. Pretty much everything supports S&#x2F;MIME, yet almost no one uses it. The DNC hack could have been avoided if those emails were encrypted, for example. Hackers would then also have to get private keys on top of data. That&#x27;s another layer to get through.<p>I suspect baby boomer led management think memorizing passphrases and using encryption is &quot;too hard&quot; and are calling the shots right now and we&#x27;re all paying the price for it. We should be teaching each other and the younger generation that email encryption should be seen the same way we look at https now. Not too long ago https was regarded as for just &#x27;credit card stuff only&#x27; because it &#x27;cost time and resources.&#x27;<p>Its sad that something as critical as email doesn&#x27;t have end to end encryption.

I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requirements of a person under subpoena, their life is much simpler if they conduct all business in person and keep no files. They use e-mail exclusively for interactions that are intended to be public. Any business communication to them is usually scheduled through a secretary and done in in-person meetings with projected slides.<p>It&#x27;s not that they have anything to hide -- but at the same time, corporate espionage is a real thing and you have to protect trade secrets and you know the government receives a copy of every e-mail and document that you do.

People only use email to create a paper trail. It&#x27;s not a discussion, as a medium it&#x27;s a set of assertions and challenges.<p>If you don&#x27;t have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren&#x27;t even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer.<p>The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to.<p>Everything about e-mail is abnormal.<p>It&#x27;s a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.

Wouldn&#x27;t you prefer encrypted email more than a conversation. You do get a lot of self destructing emails too. And custom protocols included. And they use phone calls too I presume. Those would also come under the same scrutiny right?

The thing I always think when I read articles like this (and this one from the NY Times about Senators &amp; Email [1]) is that they don&#x27;t use email because they don&#x27;t have to. They have jobs that come with many assistants &amp; aides who can communicate electornically on their behalf. They started working in these positions before email became the norm for business&#x2F;professional communication and happen to have had careers that span both eras.<p>I wonder if these people are the last (or some of the last) people that don&#x27;t use email to communicate.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;12&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;storing-emails-from-these-senators-will-be-easy-if-they-ever-send-one.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;12&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;storing-emails...</a>

This doesn&#x27;t seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank&#x2F;file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.

Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar&#x2F;inclined with tech and didn&#x27;t have to.<p>A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them.<p>Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam&#x27;s razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It&#x27;s not like you can&#x27;t use email for efficiency, and do the &#x27;lets take this offline&#x27; response when going somewhere sensitive&#x2F;secretive.

I wonder how many tech executives don&#x27;t use email?<p>I&#x27;ve got a feeling Tim Cook doesn&#x27;t use a computer, maybe just an iPad with a carefully curated list of messages and financial reports for him to browse.

Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS

Probably the most productive lot.