I don’t know if executives with attention deficit disorder mess up any more than other executives, but I do know that on occasion, we miss deadlines, we forget meetings, we get names wrong.  We interrupt and embarrass our clients or colleagues, we accidentally deliver incorrect products, and we break fragile mementos.

All executives need to learn how to make good apologies and to make appropriate amends.  Given our propensity to make (and perhaps repeat) mistakes, the burden may be even higher for ADDexecs.

CareerBuilder ran a nice article in 2005 on How to Apologize at Work.  Among their tips which are particularly important for ADDexecs.  Here’s one for when you pledge to make amends: “promising more than you can deliver is a sure way to set yourself up as the target of future outrage.”  It’s easy for people with ADD to make a hasty promises that we haven’t taken the time to figure out whether we can fulfill.  And here’s another: “After you say you’re sorry, be quiet and listen while people tell you how angry they are.”  This is hard for the hyperverbal among us, but all the more important if you want to be sincere.

Attention deficit disorder doesn’t help people focus on priorities. Immediate pleasure attracts our attention and immediate pain distracts us. But what about longterm pleasure and longterm pain? We don’t motivate ourselves toward managing those nearly as well.

Data can help. And for starters, here are three numbers we need to know if we want to maximize our long term pleasure and minimize our long term pain: the cost of customer acquisition, cost of customer retention, and value of a customer.

Also, know the difference between your average cost/value and your customer-specific cost/value. Average cost/value is useful for planning and projecting. But for management and strategy, you’ll want to know customer-specific cost and value. Why? Because then you can try to find more prospects that look like them, for the most profit (and probably the most fun).

As part of your marketing or demarketing analysis, these calculations should turn into what your sales team calls “qualifying criteria” for evaluating leads. A sales team that isn’t obligated to qualify its leads is a sales team that’s going to cost you real money chasing after “every shiny penny.” They need a system for focusing their attention!

But sales teams aren’t usually the kind of folks who like to spend time on analysis. If you’re the boss, or if you’re the marketing chief, you need to make these numbers happen. Get to it!

I was playing tennis today with my best friend and regular opponent, who asked after a while, “What’s wrong with you? It seems like on every other point, you’re turning your head away from the ball to look at something else, right before you start your swing.”

Granted, we were playing in a big park with lots of interesting to things to look at all around. But he was still right. My eyes went wandering when they still had a job to do.

What was happening? There are various explanations, but here’s an attention deficit disorder model: my mind had played through the point faster than the point was done in real life. And while real life was still happening, my mind was no longer paying attention.

But regardless of the model — the sports and business worlds are full of sayings like, “follow through”, “stay until the job is done” or “don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

These sayings make sense for many reasons: when we don’t budget our time, energy, or money well, it’s easy to run out of the essential ingredient before the goal is reached. Attention is yet another ingredient.

People with ADD can make things more complicated than they have to be.

Sometimes, this trait shows up in the products or services they try to sell.  “Blessed” with both smarts and many ideas, the ADDexec tries to create something of extraordinary value — several steps beyond what most people ever thought they could need, or refined to meet needs at an amazing level of detail.

Problem is — those products and smarts have a hard time getting off the drawing board.

Problem is — those products and smarts are often harder to sell.

Opportunity is — millions of customers are ready to buy common solutions borne out of common sense.  If you’ve got a plain-Jane solution that can save someone time or money, and if you can offer it with a modestly better price/service/packaging combination that will make your potential customer say “Hey, that’s nice.  that’s better than what I’ve got.  I’ll take it,” you may have everything you need.

Your customers might not need brilliance or a miracle.  What can you do to help them today?

Is being in a state of “flow” the same as being in a state of hyperfocus?

Flow (as first described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is almost always considered a good thing. By contrast, hyperfocus in the context of attention deficit disorder is sometimes considered good, like when we’re deeply and fully engaged with an important task for however long it takes to do a careful job right, whether that job is heart surgery or painting a room. But sometimes hyperfocus is considered bad, like when we get stuck aimlessly websurfing for hours at a time, or when we’re so absorbed in a task that we fail to notice where we’re walking.

Matt at 37Signals has a great blog summarizing Csiksentmihaly’s thoughts on Flow, which I’ll quote in part here:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on flow stemmed from his attempt to discover a path to happiness. He wanted to figure out “how to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events.”

“Flow” & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses what it feels like to be in flow:

* Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
* Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
* Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going.
* Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored.
* Sense of serenity – no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego – afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible.
* Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing.
* Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward.

– source: All About Flow at 37Signals.com

Let’s compare this with a few definitions of hyperfocus.

Here’s a positive description from Dr. Kenny Handleman in “Hyperfocus” at ADDADHDblog.com:

My definition of hyperfocus is: the ability to completely and utterly focus on one topic or issue, often to the exclusion of others, with precise and productive concentration, until the end result is achieved.

In a 1993 article at ADD.org, Dr. Ed Hallowell describes his own hyperfocus without a strongly positive or negative tone in the context of a trip to the museum:

The way I go through a museum is the way some people go through Filene’s basement. Some of this, some of that, oh, this one looks nice, but what about that rack over there? Gotta hurry, gotta run. It’s not that I don’t like art. I love art. But my way of loving it makes most people think I’m a real Philistine. On the other hand, sometimes I can sit and look at one painting for a long while. I’ll get into the world of the painting and buzz around in there until I forget about everything else. In these moments I, like most people with ADD, can hyperfocus, which gives the lie to the notion that we can never pay attention. Sometimes we have turbocharged focusing abilities. It just depends upon the situation.

Other commenters on hyperfocus (for example, contributors to the Wikipedia article on hyperfocus) point to its negative aspects using language “people with ADHD have the ability to hyperfocus, such as the well-recognised comorbidity of ADHD with autism spectrum disorders, of which excessive focus is a part.” and “Schools and parents generally expect obedience from children and reward them for it, but hyperfocused children do not always cooperate under these circumstances.” (Wikipedia entry as of 5 December 2007).

My take on this is that while Flow and Hyperfocus (as commonly understood right now) share characteristics, but aren’t the same thing.  While we adults with attention deficit disorder may experience both flow and hyperfocus from time to time, we may find it useful to pay attention to the subtleties of each experience so that we know which one we’re grooving in, and how we got there.  With this knowledge, we might have a chance at choosing whether and when to attempt a repeat engagement.

Find Your Market Niche and Stay FocusedJim A. says one of the key things he’s done that has contributed to his success is finding a market niche that no other baker occupies. “We’ve positioned ourselves as having a unique product. We don’t have a lot of competitors, and that has allowed us to maintain fairly high wholesale prices.”

Though Rebecca S.’s company provides a wide range of food service-related products and services, they are all focused on pasta. “We have been asked to do a lot of things that are very far off our path,” Rebecca says. “We think the way to survive is to become an expert in something. We’ve seen places that go too far out on a limb from their core business and get lost, and then they can’t be distinguished from others in the marketplace.”

– Jacquelyn Lynn in Start Your Own Restaurant (and Five Other Food Businesses) (Entrepreneur Magazine’s Start Ups).

As these two food folks point out, focus is about marketing and focus is about management. The marketplace understands a focused business. When customers understand who you are, they know when to use you. If you’re too many things, the customers won’t understand any of them.

And management is stronger in a focused business. When your business is tightly defined, you can get very very good at what you do. When your business is a mile wide, you’ll never get more than an inch-deep of smart about any of it. And an inch-deep of smart usually doesn’t generate much profit.

I learned that quality requires minute attention to every detail, that everyone in an organization wants to do a good job, that written instructions are seldom adequate, and that personal involvement needs to be frequent, friendly, unfocused, and unscheduled—but far from pointless. And since its principal aim is to seek out people’s thoughts and opinions, it requires good listening.

–Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, in The HP Way.

For an ADDexec, “MBWA” may have as much benefit for managing their ADD/ADHD as it does for managing their staff. Executives with the “H” in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder need the movement.

So how do we get more movement into our days? Fidgeting is one obvious outlet, but do we have others? Management By Walking Around sounds like a good one, as long as it isn’t aimless or hyperactive motion. Pre-work or mid-day exercise may be another, for the deskbound among us.

But picking a walking-oriented career may be even better. A recent CareerBuilder.com listed ten fields “considered to have the best physically active job opportunities, based on information from the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau”:

1. Registered nurse
2. Physical therapists
3. Physician assistants
4. Elementary school teachers
5. Radiologic technologists and technicians
6. Kindergarten teachers
7. Occupational therapists
8. Secondary school teachers
9. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers
10. Veterinarians.

Granted, most of those jobs aren’t considered “executive” positions. But you might find more in Laurence Shatkin’s 175 Best Jobs Not Behind a Desk. In the CareerBuilder article, Shatkin says,

“The shift to an information-based economy has meant a constant increase in the proportion of workers who manipulate data for a living, and who therefore spend most of the workday behind a a desk…. Fortunately… there are still plenty of high-activity jobs for people who prefer them… active jobs that have good earnings and are expected to have good job opportunities. They allow you to use your brains as well as muscles and involve the kinds of people and problems that can keep you interested in your work.”

– from “Out in Front”, in the News & Observer careerbuilder.com section, 4 November 2007

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Amusing related quote: “MBWA is a hyperactive, out-of-the office, interventionist top management practice.” –Vadim Kotelnikov

I’ve just done a cursory web search to see if there’s any research on the use of music as a moderating stimulus to help with attention deficit disorder.  To my surprise, I saw almost nothing.

Does music help or hinder your ability to stay focused when you’re working?

I find that reasonably “calm” music can help me stay focused while working.  But zippy music (or any music with lyrics that I know) are guaranteed distractions.  How about you?

On advice-giving:

People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

– source unknown

One of my favorite Far Side cartoons shows a man in his bedroom getting dressed for the day. A sign by his mirror reminds him, “First Pants, Then Shoes”.

As this cartoon and the above quote remind, there’s often a sequence to things. Knowing how to do the last step and knowing that the last step needs to be done are not enough if other things have to happen first.

For executives with attention deficit disorder, our ability to take mental leaps is both blessing and curse. On the one hand, we can sometimes see more quickly than others what can or ought be done. On the other hand, we sometimes miss the steps that ought be managed in between.*

Have you ever announced a plan publicly before thinking through all the details? Started writing a proposal before writing an outline? Asked a prospect for business before establishing some level of trust (both their trust of you and your trust of them)?

One last example of someone getting ahead of himself: Not long ago I was helping a client with an executive search. On one interview day, I escorted a job candidate to a meeting with two of his prospective future colleagues — one man and one woman. The candidate entered the room briskly, swept by the woman (within inches) and enthusiastically introduced himself to and shook hands with the man. “Typical”, the woman muttered to herself and me. Take a wild guess whether this guy got hired.

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*Related blog: David Maister on Being Helpful

It hit me today that “I’m afraid I might miss something” is closely tied to many of my ADD triggers.

• Some folks are laughing down the hall? Of course I go visit — I might miss something!
• Channel surfing because there’s nothing on? Sure I could turn off the TV, but I keep clicking because — I might miss something!
• Stick with a job I like and get better at every year, or go work somewhere else that just made a shiny new offer? Better take the new job — I might miss something!

The opportunity for something “new” can trigger ADD from many different angles: departure from boredom, curiosity, the excuse to physically get up and move, etc. But add another angle to the story: the fear we might miss something.

We’ve talked earlier about the “regular” kind of fear at “Fear is the Mind Killer“. But this “fear that I might miss something” is more subtle — a different kind of anxiety. We’ll take a deeper look at this in later posts, one of which will be titled “The Grass is Always Greener…”