The waning of the office phone call is one of those cultural declines that few people are likely to lament.

But the fact that a generation has grown up unaware of pulse dialing and seven-digit numbers seems meaningless when everyone still talks on the phone, constantly — on sidewalks, while riding the bus, in line at the store. That we’ve transferred a lot of office business to e-mail — well, who cares?

Ultimately, resorting to e-mail rather than picking up the phone results in not merely a quieter workplace but also a feebler one. Until we can convince senior employees to do a better job of sharing what they know about business and how they know it, we’re all better off making phone calls — and eavesdropping on those of others.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

See also, The Big Bing [2]:

You have to walk before you can run. Then later, when you're running, you need more sophisticated guidance, because doing a bunch of important things while running isn't all that easy.

In the beginning, as opposed to now, I really didn't know what I was doing. So the first things I looked at were overall strategies to very simple things that turned out to be a lot harder than they looked. Giving good phone. Taking lunch with distinction. Considering how to tackle the everyday tactical challenges that, taken together, could help define a career.