Is your communication department at the mercy of the bean counters who are looking to “slash costs and put savings to the bottom line?” Does your organization find ways to nickel and dime the communications department to death, all in the name of “rationalizing corporate spending?” Did your print budget get slashed to ribbons because somebody somewhere wanted suck up to the CFO by “getting tough on corporate waste?” Did your freelancers have to be fired so your firm could “show the analysts we mean business?”

You can stop wringing your ink-stained hands, my fellow beleaguered communicators. I’ve figured this all out for you. Here is the solution to the communication department’s financial woes: Simply institute a small charge for each email a corporate department or corporate exec wants to send to all employees. A meager $5 or $10 charge per email request will do. Just stipulate that teeny amount be paid your department each time a request comes in for an all-hands email, and you will soon be rolling in filthy lucre.

You don’t believe me? Take a look at the math:

15 zillion requests/day from corporate departments and execs to spam your colleagues with needless crap or things that could better be communicated through other means

X

$5 or $10 per request

= TOTAL WORLD FINANCIAL DOMINATION

Think about it. Not only does my innovative, out-of-the-box-thinking, best-of-breed plan put an end to the “we-can’t-afford-another-writer/you’ll-just-have-to-find-a-way-to-get-it-done” conversations with your boss, it lets you earn enough money to deliver a gift-wrapped video iPod to each employee and hire the cast of 60 Minutes to do daily news broadcasts for you. You could even throw in a full-color, employee annual report written by John Updike and photographed by Annie Liebovitz.

This trend of organizations insisting on spamming their employees reminds me greatly of the Initial Caps Theory of Importance, which states that If You Put Things In Initial Capital Letters, It Makes Them More Important. We can call this the All-Hands Email Theory, which states that To Be Important and Respected Corporate Department or Entity, You Must Send A Lot of Emails To All Employees –- Preferably More Than Other Departments Send.

Unsurprisingly, there are several corollaries to the All-Hands Email Theory. They are:

Corollary 1: Employees Only Read Email, They Do Not Read The Intranet, They Do Not Listen in Staff Meetings, You Must Get Their Attention Through Email Only.

Corollary 2: The Only Way To Cover Departmental Asses and Prove We Told Them Is By Showing We Sent An Email, And It Doesn't Matter If They Actually Read It.

Corollary 3: Corporate Spam Doesn’t Have to Be Clear, Understandable, or Engaging, Because Its Only Goal is To Cover Departmental Asses.

(Of course, the crux and foundational theory of Corporate Communications comes into play here, too. If you forgot that one, it tells non-communicators that they are Far Better At Communication Than The Trained and Dedicated Professionals They Hire To Actually Do Their Communication.)

I suspect the conversations that precede the urgent phone calls to the communications department demanding all-employee emails go something like this:

Corporate Functionary A: Did you see the email from Risk Management about having to clear all international business requests above $300K with Jane Doe?

Corporate Functionary B: Nope, I don’t read those things from Corporate. Besides, 75 percent of our people are devoted to domestic business, and only managing directors and above can put in international business requests anyway. So why would I care about that crap?

Corporate Functionary A: Well if Risk Management can send out an email to everybody about their thing, we’re going to have to get Corporate Communications to send out an email to everybody about our thing.

Corporate Functionary B: You’re right! I’m going to start whiteboarding some strategic themes and get them over to Corporate Communications so they can send something out.

Corporate Functionary A: Good thinking. I’m going to call the staff together so we can start brainstorming. We are totally going to be bonused for this!

I know that some of you find my plan smarmy and unworkable. We are communicators, you are thinking. We have more strategic and intelligent ways of truly reaching our audiences with clear, useful, interesting stuff, you may try to insist. But if your firm is anything like mine, you’re going to be strong-armed into sending these deathly things out to everybody anyway. So why not chunk a little change while you’re at it?

Go ahead. Say it with me:

“That’ll be $10, please.”