One day a man approached Ikkyu and asked: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the higheset wisdom?”

Ikkyu took his brush and wrote: “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man.

Ikkyu then wrote: “Attention.  Attention.”

“Well,” said the man, “I don’t really see much depth in what you have written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three timets: “Attention.  Attention.  Attention.”

Half-angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean, anyway?”

Ikkyu gently responded, “Attention means attention.”

– Zen Story quoted in The Little Zen Companion

David Schiller’s The Little Zen Companion is a fine little collection of Zen or Zen-related sayings and stories, nearly 400 in all.  At least a half-zen are directly related to attention, and I will quote a few of them here in later posts.

There’s Nothing as Dangerous as an Idea When It’s the Only One You Have.

– from Do One Thing Different and other uncommonly sensible solutions to life’s persistent problems, Bill O’Hanlon (1999)

I have long-respected this book for its focus on action, and for several of O’Hanlon’s eye-opening observations that very potent but also deceptively simple.   I’ll quote more of his book later but wanted to offer this quote for today.

Master Your MoodsDepressing and bad moods are notorious thieves of time. In a depression or bad mood, many people stop doing anything productive and often do things that are destructive.

Even the most up-beat individuals must occasionally confront a wily time thief called depression. If you can learn how to fight off bad moods and keep them from making off with your day, you will have acuqired an invaluable ability. Here’s how:

Develop your willpower through exercise. The ability to keep going when it’s hard to keep going is the mark of a true pro. Ray Charles, the singer, once described how much he enjoyed performing before a crowd, how there was nothing like the exhilaration of being in front of a big crowd when it’s with you. I asked: “And what do you do when the crowd is small and isn’t with you?” Ray Charles replied: “That’s when you find out whether you’re a pro or not. That’s when you work harder than ever.”

– B. Eugene Griessman, in Time Tactics of Very Successful People (1994).

With this quote, Griessman shows what I think are both the strengths and weaknesses of his book as a possible resource for executives with attention deficit disorder.  On the plus side, Griessman demonstrates that even the greatest talents — like Ray Charles, or Mark Twain who is quoted on the next page — obtain some of their success by working very hard when they don’t really feel like it.  This is always good advice, perhaps even especially for the ADDexec whose first problem — attention deficit — can immediately derail the very idea of work, much less the actual doing.

At the same time, Griessman seems to oversimplify by putting “bad mood” and “depression” in the same basket, which they’re clearly not.  Same goes for clinically evident attention deficit disorder.

In “Master Your Moods”, Griessman offers fourteen different tips ranging from “Yield to temptation” (i.e., take some time off) to “Do low-priority items on your list” (i.e., knock out some easy tasks if you can’t do the hard ones) to “Pick a career that suits your temperaments”.  I suspect that an experienced ADD coach or an experienced ADD psychotherapist or psychiatrist would tell any client, “pick and choose carefully from this list.”  Some items might be useful.  Others entirely counterproductive.

In sum, I think that Time Tactics of Very Successful People offers both useful tips and real-life inspiration to the executive with attention deficit disorder.  However, the useful parts are mixed in with much information that’s either oversimplified, incomplete, or inappropriate for an ADDexec.  If you happen across this book, give it a skim and make note of any items that look useful to you.  But don’t rush out to buy it.

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

——

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

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.

Is this the office of another self-employed ADDex?

Under some shady trees I find Bill’s Cycle Shop but no Bill. A passerby says he has “maybe gone fishing somewhere,” leaving his shop wide open. We really are in the West. No one would leave a shop like this open in Chicago or New York.

Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the “photographic mind” school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can’t even see the workbenches under them. I couldn’t work in conditions like this but that’s just because I’m not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I’ve seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he’ll have to spend days looking for it.

–”Phaedrus”, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig (1974).

“Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he’ll have to spend days looking for it.” No kidding. Recent articles suggest that a messy desk is detrimental to your career. I suspect this applies equally to messy garages, if you make a living there.

ADDexec relevance? None in particular beyond the occasional tidbit like this one. That said, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an amazing and important book that I’d recommend to anyone who thinks about quality in life, and why we sometimes do things well or poorly.

On executive behavior at strategic planning retreats, Dick Levin comments:

“I’ve observed that whenever you get a high-powered bunch of people together in a nice environment, away from all the mundane issues of running an organization, and ask them to consider futures, that setup presents an almost unavoidable temptation to bullshit. Bullshitting with intelligent people about where we ought to be ten years from today is a lot of fun, awfully stimulating, and sometimes unavoidable. Granted, we are at the retreat to do creative dreaming. But the difference between creative dreaming and bullshit is focus. So publish an outline [before the retreat starts], focus sharp, and knock off the bullshit.”

– Dick Levin in The Executive’s Illustrated Primer of Long-Range Planning(1981).

I was fortunate to take an MBA class from professor Levin just before he retired from teaching. He was an “old school” professor of management who leaned as much on data acquired from his own business experience as he did from data pulled from carefully designed surveys or government and industry reports.

The Executive’s Illustrated Primer of Long-Range Planning is not essential ADDexec reading, but it does a nice job of reminding executives in 2007 that not everything in business is about formulas. In fact, executives with attention deficit disorder might appreciate how Levin affirms the sometimes-neglected functions of intuition, observation, and not doing things the same way as everybody else (while also making sure you’re looking at the whole picture). Many of the book’s details are no longer true or relevant — business has changed since 1981* — but it’s a worthwhile read if you like incisive commentary on topics that newer texts sometimes ignore. Amazon has used copies of The Executive’s Illustrated Primer of Long-Range Planning from $0.01 plus S&H.

——

*context: the National Institute of Mental Health had cataloged and named “attention deficit disorder” only one year prior!

“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.

What triggers your ADD? For many of us, fear is the number one trigger. Fear of a difficult task, a negative outcome or an unpleasant encounter makes us look for any new candidate for our time and attention. The only requirement for the new thing is that it feel less stressful.

We’ll write more on this topic at the ADDexecutive, but let’s start with this quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Dune is known as a work of science fiction, but it spends a significant fraction of its time discussing business, economics, and the leadership mind:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

– Frank Herbert, in Dune

How effectively you allocate your attention in traffic is influenced by your emotional state at the moment. …

Learning to allocate our attention more proficiently while driving is an attitude. …

Improving visual attention skills is not limited to novice or elderly drivers. These skills can be developed over a lifetime.

Professional trainers believe that we can improve our attention skills year after year. However, most drivers do nothing to hone their skills during long hours in the car. Many drivers assume that their attention skills are adequately developed; they have become comfortable with their day-to-day driving challenges. This familiarity promotes a sense of immunity from accidents. Some drivers don’t recognize the value in attention training because they assume this training is intended only for professional drivers. Others simply don’t believe that such an easily acquired skill can yield a large payoff.

– from Disciplined Attention: How to Improve Your Visual Attention When You Drive by Kenneth Mills, PhD (2005)

In reading this book, I was surprised at how much of the text about attention in driving seemed entirely relevant to attention in managing our businesses and ourselves. Two themes in the book seemed most apt for transfer to the business world:

(1) “Paying attention to paying attention” is a critical attitude.

(2) Attention management is a trainable skill — not a “you have it or you don’t” talent.

Disciplined Attention is a resource book used for various “traffic school” programs in North Carolina and elsewhere. The book draws on two highly but differently qualified pools of experts: (1) cognitive psychologists who study how the brain and body work while tracking multiple streams of info, and (2) expert driving instructors from areas such as law enforcement and auto racing.

For the executive with attention deficit disorder, Disciplined Attention may be useful on two counts: (1) for the insights into ADD that may come in a little more clearly because they’re framed in a different context from our usual readings about attention deficit disorder and (2) for the important lessons on attention management for driver safety. I haven’t read any studies about ADD and traffic safety, but it’s a fair guess that adults with ADD are extra prone to distraction-oriented accidents.

Buy a copy at Amazon from $10.93: Disciplined Attention: How to Improve Your Visual Attention When You Drive