No sooner is a new tool invented than someone cooks up an off-label use. Sometimes an off-label application improves on the initially conceived one. For example, Thomas Edison originally intended the phonograph to be a dictation machine, not a source of entertainment. Soon enough wiser heads and market forces prevailed. Edison abandoned his folly and went into the recording business. Frequently, however, altering the intended use of an invention corrupts rather than elevates it—and its user.

Let’s consider personal technologies, which have become means of shifting responsibility, tacitly or explicitly, to a device and away from oneself. Cell phones, for instance, have long been used self-importantly to showcase their users’ raw power while the technology takes the heat for the offense. I recently overheard these swaggering words in an airport departure lounge: “You tell him I’m coming in there this afternoon to fire his ass!”

Then there’s mortifying exhibitionism—intimate, embarrassing lovers’ quarrels or, worse, smarmy public displays of affection (which, by the way, is what PDA once stood for). Mobile phones have been used slothfully by people pretending to be too busy with a business call to be confronted about some dereliction of theirs. Camera-equipped models have been put to especially heinous misuse as tiny digital Peeping Toms wielded surreptitiously on escalators and beneath conference-room tables.

But my favorite example of off-label use of a PDA—call it “excuse technology”—is one involving Lurita Doan, head of the US General Services Administration (GSA). Doan testified at a 2007 congressional subcommittee hearing into the alleged untoward politicization of her agency— namely, brown-bag lunches during which political appointees to the GSA were urged to use their positions to help elect Republicans. When asked under oath what transpired at these lunches, Doan said she had not been paying attention because she was doing e-mail on her BlackBerry.

I cast no aspersions on Doan’s memory or motives. She spoke for many when she offered this perfectly plausible excuse for modern inattention. Technology has grown so prosaic as to become the all-purpose, dog-ate-my-homework dodge for busy grown-ups. Anticipate, therefore, epidemic levels of BlackBerry- and Treo-constrained recollection of important decisions made in your presence or of orders you’ve issued to your teams.

Forewarned is forearmed. You may be tempted to ban the use of these devices during important meetings and discussions. You will, of course, make sure that someone’s on hand to take careful notes to then circulate among attendees, so that those present know they’re accountable. And if employees are correct in believing that multitasking during boring meetings allows them to accomplish work of a higher value, ban those meetings. 

Lew McCreary is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

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My blackberry ate my accountability

No sooner is a new tool invented than someone cooks up an off-label use. Sometimes an off-label application improves on the initially conceived one.

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After his early retirement as the senior vice president for integrated sales and marketing of ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp., Nicanor Gabunada Jr. is back in marketing as the president and chief executive officer of ZOOmms, a company that is pushing mobile marketing in the country.

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Sterling achievement

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Winning: Managing the Risks of Rogues

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Homecourt advantage

When property consulting giant CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) tapped Rick M. Santos to put up its Philippines office in 1995, he was sure from the start he would have a great time back at his birthplace because he knew he could make a difference.

Faithful but creative

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Winning: In business and politics, leadership is key

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