Early in my career, I was working with a senior manager on an organisational initiative that required budget approval from a leader at our head office. The amount wasn’t large, but we needed the approval quickly. I drafted the email and sent it to my manager for review. He looked at it, smiled, and instead of hitting Send, asked me to pull up a chair beside him. Then he rewrote the email. Here’s roughly what happened. My subject line read something like “Request Budget Approval” — accurate, but it could have been any of a dozen emails sitting in his … Continue reading Why Some Messages Get Instant Action — And Others Just Sit There