It’s very tempting to limit your interactions with people to email. It’s faster, more to the point, cheaper and it creates a record of the communication.
The problem is that emails do not turn into conversations and its conversations that are powerful in the pursuit of luck.
In a conversation people “bounce off each other” and with each “bounce” topics, thoughts and ideas tend to meander into areas that a matter of fact discussion or communication can never go.
Recently I was bidding for project to provide a consultancy in a defined geographic area, so I picked up the phone and had a conversation with a consultant who was bidding for a different area. The result was that I gave the consultant a couple of good ideas to improve his bid and I picked up two ideas of how to value-add my consultancy approach and the quality of the bid. These ideas would never had been elicited from email communication, because I would have to asked in writing “can you please tell me your ideas?” and he probably would have replied “no”.