Creative Detachment

Newsweek is huffing and puffing over the fact that the Katrina hearings have revealed that the secretaries of the departments of Defense and Homeland Security - namely Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Chertoff - don’t use e-mail.

They should calm down.

I love e-mail but then I don’t have an army of aides to provide briefings. Rumsfeld and Chertoff do. Can a failure to use e-mail put them out of the loop on some issues? Certainly, but the use of e-mail can also put them out of the loop in other ways. The time devoted to e-mail messages can sometimes be better spent listening to the intensity of an associate’s comments or dropping in on an area of interest.

It is not the quantity of the information that makes a difference. It is the quality. Lyndon Johnson watched way too many television news broadcasts and read far too many polls. It adversely affected his conduct of the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan met at least one too many of the relatives of people held hostage by terrorists. Their raw emotion may have tugged him into the Iran-Contra disaster.

Detachment has its advantages. Mahatma Gandhi designated a time each week when he would not speak. When he was president of France, Charles de Gaulle used to go off to a country home that did not have a telephone. Each knew that the blur of life and information can be wearing.

Rumsfeld and Chertoff don’t use e-mail? In itself, that means nothing. The more important question is how does that fit into their overall management styles.