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I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the
by nathantotten 9y ago
I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the reality is that executives actually value this communication. It helps them learn of problems they may otherwise be insulated from. Of course executives generally also don’t make their email too readily available because then everyone would contact them and that wouldn’t scale.
I have emailed various executives over the years and don’t recall it ever not working. It even worked with Comcast to my surprise - the next day someone from some department like “executive customer service” contacted me.
- baxtr 9y agoBe aware that these guys rarely read their email themselves. They have a dedicated team that handles all these requests, usually on their own. (I’m not an executive, but I have good insights)
- adrianratnapala 9y agoFine, but that's even better. It means they are doing something like using the execs inbox as a black-box monitoring stream to find out about problems that internal info gathering will miss. And better still, actually paying people to triage the alerts!
- nathantotten 9y agoYeah, this of course happens at the CEO levels, but I don't think it undermines the principle. If those people reading the emails are empowered to actually fix problems and if they are reporting back experiences to the CEO or relevant executives the information still makes it into the org. In my experience, based on the email thread I think the CEO of Home Depot actually did read it. I left out a step in my story. What actually happened is the VP of Loss Prevention emailed me asking for my number so he could call me. I gave it and he called me. He actually replied to me via the original email. From the thread I could tell that the CEO forwarded it to the VP of Home Depot North America with something like "Jane, can you look into this?" then that person forwarded it to the VP with a more specific request. Based on my internal experiences at big companies this is pretty common.
- robk 9y agoJeff bezos sends all his mail to a low grade support team in India who have terrible canned responses
- ericd 9y agoHilarious if true, given that Amazon frontline support is generally excellent.
- leesalminen 9y agoI tried jeff@ once. I received a quality reply in <24 hours and my issue was resolved. As far as I can remember the English was perfect.
- Cd00d 9y agoI got a canned reply that didn't address the fundamental issue, but yes the English was perfect.
- dman 9y agoThis has been my experience as well, I emailed Lisa Su about some issue I was having with an AMD product and she (or her team that monitors her email) were very responsive and helped me sort my issue out.