People at work ask hundreds of questions every day by email. For some, this can lead to an
overflowing inbox. Mastercard boss, Ajay Banga, has a very different approach to dealing
with this type of email, as Lesley Curwen discovered.
Curwen: Let me ask you a question about your management technique. I understand you’ve
got a rule: if an employee sends you an email asking permission to do something, then there’s
a very specific reaction to that. If you don’t get a reply to the email, what happens then?
Banga: Well, that’s all about urgency. Basically, my approach is that if you don’t get an
answer within a specified period of time, and the specified period of time differs a little bit,
depending on how serious the matter is.
Then it means that you are approved to go ahead. So what happens is, it shifts the burden of
response to the individual who has been asked for permission, as against to the individual
who is asking, who then has to keep chasing up into a, let’s say, a black hole.
Curwen: How well does it work? Do you ever find that mistakes have been made because of
this?
Banga: Yeah, you have to be careful and that’s why you’ve got to set the right time limit for
different kinds of things. But you know, leadership is about change. And change is about
driving people into places to do things they wouldn’t normally have done. And then you’ve
got to get out of the way. You’ve got to empower people to take some of these thoughtful
risks with a sense of urgency.
That’s the way that you’ve got to drive a company of thousands of people, because you can’t
be everywhere yourself. And centralising everything is certainly not the right way for a
decentralised company to work.

Vocabulary and definitions

Related news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00dt2r5 ^[1]
Read and listen to the story and the vocabulary online:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/wordsinthenews/2011/02/110223_witn_businessemail_page.shtml ^[2]