From the Wall Street Journal’s review of The Education of an Accidental CEO: Lessons Learned from the Trailer Park to the Corner Office

Obviously, Mr. [David] Novak’s pitchman fervor and people skills are joined to a traditionally shrewd sense of how to make a profit. Still, he seems to relish being the hyperkinetic iconoclast. He describes himself as “the one among the Brooks Brothers power suits with his shirttail sticking out.” The CEO says that he avoids working weekends if he can help it, so as to focus on family and relaxation, and it may be good for Yum that he does.

“Sometimes,” he confesses, “the worst thing that can happen to our company is me getting a free day in the office. I’m a creative guy and I can start dreaming up stuff to do when we haven’t finished what we started.”

– Richard Gibson in “Business Bookshelf: Pitchman in the Corner Office”, Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2007.

Yum Brands is one of the world’s largest restaurant companies, whose brands include KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco bell, Long John Silver’s and A&W.

When you feel your company is struggling to stay focused, take heart in knowing that even the biggest companies — with their monster budgets for hiring smart people — often have the same problem.

Here’s an excerpt of the Washington Post’s coverage of focus problems at Sprint Nextel

Interim Sprint CEO Sets Out To Restore Company’s Focus

[Interim CEO Paul] Saleh said the company has tried to tackle too many big changes in the past year.

Saleh’s solution: Improve customer service and simplify the business.

“We had too many things on our plate before. . . . We were doing too many things to reach too many customers too quickly,” he said. “We have to do fewer things, but do them very well.”

– Kim Hart, in Interim Sprint CEO Sets Out To Restore Company’s Focus, Washington Post, 19 October 2007. (Emphasis added.)

Photo Credit : Sprint Nextel. In case you were wondering, their 2006 revenue was $41 billion dollars. Tons of money do not guarantee smart decisions.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then. I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Walt Whitman is as good an example as you’ll ever find for someone who knew who he was, how he was different, and where his excellence lay. He didn’t need his world to fit into a regular grid and we’re all the better for it.

Photo: Library of Congress

It’s tempting to make promises, but can you fulfill them all?

– a recent fortune cookie

Such a strange feeling: to not say “yes”. Or to say nothing at all when there’s a call for volunteers — not even an “I’m sorry, but my schedule is full.” Just nothing at all in response to, “Would anyone be willing to help with _____?”

And then the strange surprise, nearly always: to hear nothing in response. No recrimination. No anger. No surprise. Just the sound of silence as your asker moves on to figure out some other solution.

“If you want to know what is happening in the rest of the forest (and be in business fora long time), perch in different trees from time to time. Force yourself to travel to places you’ve never been before, shop in stores you never frequented before, eat in restaurants that you’ve never patronized, read books and magazines that are outside your specific industry, and attend trade shows of other industries.”

– Guy Kawasaki in Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services (1997).

How is this relevant to executives with attention deficit disorder? We can’t help but perch in different trees from time to time — sometimes from minute to minute!

Kawasaki’s point is this: our flitting about, our wandering, and our “aimless” explorations of new things are useful business traits. More importantly, Kawasaki is pointing out that many other business people should push themselves to do more of what we do naturally. In this, we have a competitive advantage.

“Of course, [Warren] Buffett isn’t the only person to have realized the power of building his life around his strengths. Whenever you interview people who are truly successful at their chosen profession–from teaching to telemarketing, acting to accounting–you discover that the secret to their success lies in their ability to discover their strengths and to organize their life so that these strengths can be applied.”

–Now, Discover Your Strengths, Buckingham & Clifton (2001), recently updated as StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths (2007).

ADDexec relevance: the authors identify 34 types of strengths in their system of “StrengthsFinder themes”, of which four seem to be typical of many ADDexecs:

“Activator: people strong in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.”

Adaptability: People strong in the Adaptability theme prefer to “go with the flow.” They tend to be “now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.

“Empathy: People strong in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations.

“Ideation: People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.”

One nice feature of this book is its section on how to manage people who have these different strengths. For each strength, the authors give a page of tips, such as these:

“How to Manage a Person Strong in Adaptability

• “This person lives to react and respond. Position him so that his success depends on his ability to accommodate the unforeseen and then run with it.

• “With his instinctively flexible nature he is a valuable addition to almost every team. When balls are dropped or plans go awry, he will adjust to the new circumstances and try to make progress. He will not sit on the sidelines and sulk.

• “Be ready to excuse this person from meetings about the future, such as goal-setting meetings or career-counseling sessions. He is a “here-and-now” person and so will find these meetings rather irrelevant.”

Whether or not you agree with the authors’ recommendations, you may find them useful perspectives as you consider managing individuals with their different strengths, or as you consider telling others (or yourself) how to manage your own ADDexec self.

It is a damn poor mind indeed which can’t think of at least two ways to spell any word.

– Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States (1829-1837)

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.

The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Apple Computer advertisement, 1997. Watch the video at Wikipedia links here.

You can’t have a lot of balls in the air unless you’ve got a lot of balls.

– an anonymous friend of the ADDexecutive

From A messy desk undermines your career, by Penelope Trunk

When it comes to projecting a positive image through your personal space, some areas are more easily managed than others. A messy desk is tough. If you keep a messy desk, it’s probably inadvertent, and you will have to change behavior in order to clean up your act. It’s worth the effort, though. “There is a cultural bias toward orderliness,” says Eric Abrahamson, professor at Columbia University Business School, “Messiness is considered bad.” Kelly Crescenti, an Illinois-based career coach, concurs: “When people have a clean desk it looks like they get things done and they are productive.”

You cannot really know how productive someone is by looking at their desk, says Julie Morgenstern organizing guru and author of Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work. But she concedes that “the image issue is giant.” So even if you can find everything you need on your pile-laden desk, clean it if you want to look good. Start with a filing system, and Crescenti advises that at minimum, you take the last fifteen minutes of every day to actually use the system and clean things up a little before you go home.

But as with all image management advice, don’t go overboard: Everything in moderation. Abrahamson provides a postmodern defense of the messy desk: “Messiness is related to creativity because it tends to juxtapose things that don’t normally go together.”

Penelope Trunk is a columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance, with a witty and often wise blog at Brazen Careerist — Advice at the Intersection of Work and Life.

For a few ADDexec relevant posts at the Brazen Careerist, check out:

• Make life more stable with more frequent job changes,
• Good news for job hoppers: Frequent change maintains passion, and
• 10 tips for time management in a multitasking world

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Image: ADDexecutive.com