Workplace Buzz: Today’s Headlines

Workplace Buzz on November 13, 2007 7:26 AM

Managing Email
Every morning when he flips on his office computer, Thomas Boston rips with a fury into the hundreds of e-mails that have silently invaded his computer's inbox. But for every one he kills, reinforcements quickly pop up. "E-mail is the Trojan horse of office productivity," says Boston, an economics professor at Georgia Tech and owner of the EuQuant research firm. "Most people I know spend more time checking e-mails than reading for knowledge or pleasure. I can easily spend three hours each day on e-mail-related tasks." The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Manipulated by Alpha Males
Men may have created the glass ceiling in the workplace, says Christopher Flett, but women keep it there by kowtowing to men and allowing themselves to be easily manipulated by the alpha males of the world. If that statement gets your juices flowing, that's just the reaction the man some have called a ''management shock jock'' is looking for with a new book called, What Men Don't Tell Women About Business: Opening Up the Heavily Guarded Alpha Male Playbook, (Wiley, $22.95). ''I don't mince words,'' Flett says. ''I think too many people are trying to be politically correct and the message just gets muddied.'' Salt Lake Tribune

Equal Opportunity Abusers
Elizabeth White used to work for a boss who singled out a different person to ridicule at every meeting. "Every idea the person presented was wrong," she recalls. "For the whole meeting, the person's contributions would be shot down. Inevitably he would break out the phrase, 'What kind of idiot would come up with an idea like that?' "We would slouch down in our chairs and hope it wasn't our turn," adds White, a Chicago-area manager who quit for another job. "He was an equal opportunity picker-on." People who harass minorities or women do so at their peril because they risk running afoul of federal civil rights laws. Chicago Tribune

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