CC. That pretty little designation at the top of your emails means more now than Carbon Copy; so few of us even know what carbon is anymore. CC is now synonymous with Corporate Coverage—as in your ass.

You know you’ve crossed into Corporate Coverage when:

…you receive an email from a coworker asking for details on a project or account

… you respond CCing your boss, your coworkers’ superior, your assistant (if you’re lucky) and Legal.

I heard Carl Corporate, another CC whom we know but don’t necessarily always love, talking about how important to play the game of CCing: because Carl inundates the higher-ups with so many emails, each detailing how he has accomplished a task that is part of his job description; eventually H-Us delete the emails without looking at them.

It’s the greatest (nay, oldest) game played in corporations and underlies the largest problem we have as a work culture, one that will disappear as email becomes less “the thing.” As email-on-a-diet America becomes reality, we must stop spending time to look like we are working, cultivating an atmosphere where overt kissing tactics are not only smiled upon but promoted as good job, Beanie.

Essentially, when we pretend to work, no work gets done because emails go unanswered. And during the day it’s a round robin of folks writing one another nonstop.

Please sigh.

We must stop covering our butts by CCing everyone and anyone. What’s better for the future is: learning how to just freaking speak up.

So here’s what will happen after emailing goes away like the dodo bird. We begin to get work done, find sight of the importance of what we do, take responsibility for what we’ve done, or haven’t yet, and talk loudly in a gracious, respectable manner when it is sincerely time to take credit for anything. Credit is good. (Insert caveman groan.)

Everyone will go back to working for a singular goal: the mission of a company. If one fails, we all fail, and there’s no longer such a thing as taking the fall. No one has to take a single bullet for any team.

Since email is, however, still killing us, there are some tasks to perfect: First, outlaw CCing at your firm (thank me later).

Then you should write a couple of notes to people you work with, the kind you need penmanship for. You’ll get a response you never anticipated: appreciation for time you took.

Imagine writing something that someone actually reads and then responds to. My heart!

Richard Laermer is RLM’s mostly fearless Leader and author of the forthcoming McGraw-Hill tltle 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade. No CC’s were hurt in the creation of this article.