All Wired Up
Unlike the other two CEOs described here, Steven Ettridge is a genuine gadget freak. He got his first computer in 1964, at the tender age of 11, a Stone Age analog with resistors. When he founded the temporary employment agency Temps & Co. in 1981, he used an Apple Lisa to do spreadsheets and budget analysis. By the mid-1980s he was turning heads on the highway as an early cellular-phone user.
Now Ettridge uses his car--a Porsche Carrera, complete with plug-in port for faxes and E-mail--as a mobile office when he shuttles among company headquarters in Washington, D.C., and his 15 offices along the D.C.-Baltimore-Philadelphia corridor. Yet he conspicuously lacks a laptop or notebook computer. Ettridge brands them too heavy, too short on battery life, and too much trouble. But he's a reasonable man: "If they ever come up with a flat-panel color screen around 8-by-11, and the keyboard was on the screen and you could touch it, and it weighed a pound, and the battery lasted a week, and it had a 28.8 modem, then I'd have to reconsider."
Instead, he packs a U.S. Robotics PalmPilot, a Motorola StarTAC cellular phone, and a Motorola text pager. This high-tech trinity lives inside the zippered leather case of his traveling calendar, a three-ring-binder affair, about which he's almost apologetic.
"The ugly little secret--it works like a charm. I've had a hard time finding an electronic scheduling device that's as good as a thin paper calendar," says Ettridge. "I can throw a colored line across three weekly calendars and indicate Uncle George will be in town. I can schedule overlapping appointments and sort out the conflicts later. And I get a permanent record. Computers don't do a good job of archiving."
Like so many other techies, Ettridge is forever replacing his tools with newer, better models. For example, he recently switched PDAs, jettisoning his Sony Magic Link in favor of the PalmPilot. Although he found the Magic Link highly intuitive and a great electronic address book and E-mail tool, "it had one fatal flaw," he explains. "There's no convenient way to back it up. You get your life in there, and if it craps out and dies, you're cooked."
Thanks to a special cradle accessory called HotSync, Ettridge's new PalmPilot downloads from or uploads to a PC in seconds. On the road, he'll retrieve E-mail in the car and then between appointments (or occasionally during a plodding meeting) scan his electronic messages and compose replies.
Still, like Settle, Ettridge gets the most use out of his mobile phone and pager. He says he's become so dependent on them that he'd plead with a mugger: "Here's my wallet. Don't take my other stuff." It's not surprising then that Ettridge maintains "hot backups" of both. His car phone and mobile phone share the same number, and he always keeps a spare pager at work.
That safeguard served him well during a trip to Philadelphia last April. Arriving in town for the Presidents' Summit on Volunteerism, Ettridge suddenly realized he'd left his pager in his car, which was parked in a garage near Union Station in Washington. He called his office and had his spare sent by overnight mail.
Without his pager, Ettridge is truly handicapped, for he's found that cellular phones make "terrible incoming devices." Give out your number and not only will the thing ring you numb, but you're also obliged to answer it. So Ettridge, like Settle, uses his phone almost exclusively for outgoing calls, mainly responding to pager messages that he reads at his convenience.
The tiny pager is a real workhorse, the technological equivalent of baking soda. Ettridge uses it to write himself messages, sort of like a string around the finger. He'll sometimes "call himself" and leave a message or a to-do list. The alarm reminds him of an important meeting or call, and he sleeps with the pager at his bedside, set for two wake-up buzzes. "It's my power alarm," he says.
How does Ettridge keep up with new models and features for all this gear? He doesn't. Instead, he's delegated that job to his systems manager, who serves as a technology coach. "He gets to buy all the productivity tools he wants, and he gives me a Reader's Digest [report on] whether it's worth playing with or not," says Ettridge. The 20 to 30 percent of stuff that doesn't pass muster with this high-tech "royal taster" can generally be returned for full refunds within 30 days. Companies lacking an obvious "toy meister" to serve as technology coach need not despair, says Ettridge. "If you have college kids, one of them would love the job."
Armed with his mobile phone, pager, and electronic address book, Ettridge fields as many as five- or six-dozen phone calls a day, even while out of the office. That helps explain his very different strategy at home. "The last thing I want to do is get home and find two-dozen calls waiting for me," he says. At first, he fought back by recording a message saying, "Sorry, the tape is full." When that angered some folks, he decided to take a more daring step for this technological age: he unplugged the answering machine.
John Grossmann is editor and publisher of NewsReach, a monthly small-business newsletter based in Mountain Lakes, N.J.
Why are you telling me all this?
The push-button ease of E-mail and the never-out-of-touch capabilities of a pager/cellular-phone combo have many CEOs wondering how they ever did without. But as with most productivity advances, there's a dark side. "The potential pitfall with E-mail is overload, and the same goes for pagers," says Gene Griessman, an Atlanta-based time-management consultant and author of the book Time Tactics of Very Successful People (McGraw-Hill, 1996). "Burnout is a major possibility if you're always accessible. My recommendation: put yourself in your appointment book. Schedule some time every day for quiet or recreation." Griessman also offers four suggestions for fighting E-mail overload:
- For intracompany E-mail, assign messages a priority ranking (A, B, C or 1, 2, 3) to flag their importance.
- Preface each long message with a synopsis of what it's all about, modeled after abstracts found at the beginning of scientific papers.
- Also up top, highlight upcoming action items.
- Consider establishing a second E-mail account for urgent and high-priority messages or key clients.
