Exclamation Points!

From Monday's WSJ:

Nancy Camarota, a customer-relations executive at Allied Waste Industries Inc., said she thought it was odd when a Deloitte & Touche USA LLP consultant used an exclamation point in an email. 'Guys do not use exclamation points,' she thought. 'Is he making fun of me?'

Exclamation points are one piece of Deloitte's new strategy for communicate with women clients. Cathy Benko, co-author of Mass Career Customization, is spearheading the initiative. Consultants are being trained to:

...sit across from women at a table, rather than next to them, and to bring subordinates to meetings because women value knowing the people who do the work. In the case of the exclamation point, Ms. Camarota had used one in an earlier email; the Deloitte consultant says he was responding to her enthusiasm as part of the new program.

We're living in an age where everything can be customized -- by gender, age, work preferences, etc. And that's the subject of Cathy's book -- how to align careers with their workers.