Directions: Read the following scenario and answer the questions below:

While e-mail may be a very useful—even indispensable—form of communication in organizations, it certainly has its limits and dangers. Indeed, e-mail can get you into trouble with more people, more quickly, than almost any other form of communication.

Ask Bill Cochran. Cochran, 44, is a manager at Richmond Group, a Dallas-based advertising agency. As Richmond was gearing up to produce a Superbowl ad for one its clients—Bridgestone—Cochran’s boss sent an e-mail to 200 people describing the internal competition to determine which ad idea would be presented. Cochran chose the occasion to give a pep talk to his team. Using “locker room talk,” he composed an e-mail criticizing the other Richmond teams, naming employees he thought would provide them real competition—and those who wouldn’t. What Cochran did next—hit the Send key—seemed so innocuous. But it was a keystroke he would soon wish he could undo. Shortly after he sent the e-mail, a co-worker, Wendy Mayes, wrote to him: “Oh God . . . Bill. You just hit REPLY ALL!”

Questions

After realizing what he had done, how should Cochran have responded to this situation?

After the incident, Mayes says of Cochran: “His name soon became synonymous with ’idiotic behavior’ such as ‘don’t pull a Cochran.’” Is it unethical to participate in such ribbing?

Kaspar Rorsted, CEO of Henkil, a consumer and industrial products company based in Germany, says that copying others on e-mails is overused. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “If they want to write me, they can write me. People often copy me to cover their back.” Do you agree? How can you decide when copying others is necessary vs. “a waste of time”?