To Email or Not to Email? That is the Question.

Who knew Shakespeare could lead us to design The Definitive Guide to Change Management?

What do I mean by that? Well, AchieveIt is a product that is all about giving people a new way to get work done, so in addition to being a tool for strategy execution, you can certainly say we are a Business Insight Platform because we are most certainly changing how people work for the better.

It's a pretty big and bold mission. While our approach is unique, I would be lying if I told you we were the only ones working on this type of concept. To be truthful, there are a number of companies in the realm of task management (such as Trello, and Asana), several in the world of goal-setting (Betterworks, and 7geese), project management (Workfront), and countless others, all trying in their own ways, to deliver a new way for people to work together.

There are similarities among these products. But more importantly, there are differences. One of the most fundamental is whether they integrate well with email vs. trying to eliminate it altogether. This brings us to the title of this post.

If your mission is really to change how people work, you might think the right way to do that is to provide a complete replacement for the mishmash of desktop and siloed vertical applications people use now. And not just the products themselves but also the way those products work, including getting rid of email as a primary form of collaborative communication.

If you listen to experts on business processes, the evolution of human capital management, and the future of work, you will hear people say email has outlived its utility and it's welcome. And it is true.

But it's also true email is still an intoxicating drug; the heroin of basic business applications. Once you are addicted it is nearly impossible to quit.

This presented us with a true catch-22. On one hand, we were building a system to change how people get work done entirely.  On the other, we know for the majority of people, change is difficult. Some people will do anything to resist it.

So how do you get people to change how they work when you know the vast majority of organizations – except maybe tech companies where most people are young and/or tech-savvy – there are going to be people who don't want to change (leave email behind).

The answer to this problem is flexibility. So we designed AchieveIt to give people a choice depending on their tolerance for change. Allowing some people to eliminate email altogether. And giving others a more gradual path incorporating traditional email into the workflow of the application.

We believe the resulting flexibility is essential if you're going to get people to really change how they work. True proponents of change can do everything within our cloud-based application. Those who are uncertain of change or who need to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming can rely on the fully-integrated email option to keep in touch with their team.

That makes it ideal for the 99% of businesses around the world who are not Uber, or who have people who don't even know what Uber is.

If you're a leader at one of those kinds of businesses looking for a more efficient way to work, be more competitive, more productive, to achieve unprecedented results, to keep your team and your people on task, on time, on budget, to keep them connected, informed, and ahead of the curve, then AchieveIt is made just for you.

The road to management excellence, operational excellence, change management, and results management, is never easy. But with AchieveIt, it's possible.

And you'll never have to say "to email, or not to email, that is the question."

I'm not sure if any of those other products mentioned at the start can say the same thing.