Are you teetering on the brink of the abyss?

The deep, dark bottomless nothing? The dark side? The seductive, addicting evil?

I’m speaking of course, of e-mail.

During our merger discussions, we gave a lot of thought to how the Blue Horse and MMT cultures would blend. Anytime you take two companies with a plan to build a third, whether they are ad agencies or airlines, you have to spend a lot of time mulling cultural consequences.

One of the key factors we considered was that both companies, MMT and Blue Horse, are very employee-friendly places to work. Part of that is just the nature of the people who populate them. But an equal (if not larger) part is a very real belief that our cultures encourage productivity and quality. They reward emotional participation. We want to foster pride in one’s performance.

To do that, we need honesty (not every performance is a good one) and open communication (not every management decision is a smart one). And when “stuff happens,” we want everyone to lend a hand and to do it in a very professional way.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

All of us have gotten e-mails from bosses or co-workers that read like a single spaced letter from a law firm with designs on our property. Sometimes the tone was unintentional, but given the medium, it still reads like a grand jury indictment.

But sometimes the writer uses e-mail to “put in writing” the most outlandish and unsubstantiated versions of the “facts” in order to reinforce their own opinions and to try to establish a pecking order.

And sometimes the whole thing borders on the psychotic. Someday, somewhere, someone will write a book entitled “E-Mails From Hell” and I’ll bet we all have a few saved in a file that we could contribute. I have a couple from a previous life that are truly hilarious now. But at the time, they did a lot of damage and in a very cowardly manner. They’re clearly more demeaning to the sender than to the recipient.

One of the things we’ve done at Blue Horse and which we’ll continue at Blue Horse/MMT is to outlaw nasty e-mails. Yup, just outlaw them. Like smoking, bringing in firearms and leaving your lunch in the refrigerator for two weeks. Around here, it’s a spoken rule that if you need to spend a couple of hours writing and sending a nasty e-mail (and you all know one when you get one), you need to have a face-to-face meeting with the intended recipient.

To go one step further, we make it a practice to use e-mails to positively reinforce, applaud and encourage people. To us, that’s the kind of communication that should be in writing for all to see.

E-mail is a wonderful way to communicate. If communication is, in fact, your goal. But if you have a beef, or you don’t understand, or you just think something ought to be handled a different way, e-mails can be gasoline on a candle. Anytime these start to fly, everyone – management and employees – needs to put an end to it.

“We just don’t do that around here,” can and should be said by anyone. “Now, let’s talk about this.”

Talking, especially about tough subjects, is harder than hiding behind a computer screen. And sometimes talking isn’t going to settle the issue either. But for a company to truly be a group of individuals who share a common goal, talking should be the place to start rather than the last resort.

So the next time you feel like leaping into the abyss, I hope this causes you to take a deep breath and perhaps get up off your chair to go see someone instead.

Besides, we can all use the exercise.