Of the things we think, say or do:
Is it the TRUTH?
Is it FAIR to all concerned?
Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

– The Four-Way Test of Rotary International

Yesterday we quoted Plato. Today we mention a more detailed filter that might be useful for any of the hyperverbal or impulsive among us. The Four-Way Test was created in 1932 by Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor, who was in the midst of turning around a bankrupt company. See the whole story here.

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

- Ovid (43 BCE – 17 CE)

Steve Allen is best known as a comic and as creator of the Tonight Show, but he’s also an intellectual and teacher whose books include Dumbth — The Lost Art of Thinking.  In Dumbth, he offers “101 Ways to Reason Better & Improve  Your Mind.”

Here is one in particular for the executive with attention deficit disorder:

Rule No. 22.  Know that reason need not be the enemy of emotion.

When some people hear reason being endorsed they assume that, if the amount of rationality in the world is increased, it must inevitably follow that certain increments of sensation and emotion will decrease.

Entirely false, of course.  Reason helps us know which plans and ideas are truly strong or even great.  Knowing that, we are encouraged and at liberty to pursue them with gusto, excitement, delight.  Fully and without nagging doubts born out of uncertainty.  That sounds like a nice emotional mix to me.  If ADDexecs enjoy excitement perhaps even more than regular people, then it makes all the more sense that we should pursue it.  When it makes sense.

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Bonus: Steve Allen also suggests Rule 99.  “Be humble when consulting your memory.”  No explanation needed on that, right?

In today’s New York Times, there’s advice for meeting leaders on how to stop “blatherers” from monopolizing meetings.

But what if the leader is the monopolizer?

Help your colleagues help you by giving them permission (or orders!) to interrupt you when you’re taking the meeting where it doesn’t need to go. And help both yourself and them by telling them what kind of language will get you to stop, without accidentally making you mad.*

Excerpt from the NYTimes:

Q. One or two blatherers always end up monopolizing the discussion at meetings, and running everything off the rails. How do you get them to stop?

A. Monopolizers need to be reined in because they rarely have the self-awareness to stop talking themselves, said Glenn Parker, a team-building consultant in Skillman, N.J., and co-author of “Meeting Excellence.”

It’s O.K. to interrupt a monopolizer, Mr. Parker said. But be polite about it, perhaps by validating what the person has said. You might say something like this: “I think you’re making a good point. Let’s see how the rest of the team feels about that.”

Then turn away from the talker, preferably to another part of the room, and ask someone else his or her opinion on the topic.

Similarly, he said, if a monopolizer or anyone else goes off on a tangent, you can say something like: “I may be wrong here, but I thought we were supposed to be dealing with customer complaints. If you all agree, let’s get back to the agenda.”

– Phyllis Korki, “Another Meeting? Say It Isn’t So“, Career Couch, New York Times, July 20, 2008

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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.

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.

“Yeah, we know we want to chase after every shiny penny.” That’s what one of my clients used to say, sheepishly, every time I’d remind them to focus.

There’s so much business to chase after, and every shiny penny looks like it’s worth chasing…

Try this today: when you feel the urge to do something big (like bid on an RFP you just saw) or even something small (read a trade journal article that caught your eye), ask yourself, “is a shiny penny pulling me away from what I really ought to be doing?”

You might do it anyway, but at least you’ll know

“Is that your dinner? Do I need to call your mom?”  Shay the bartender asked me that back in ‘99 when I sat down at 6 p.m. for two packs of peanuts, some Nabs and a Diet Coke.  I had an office next door and was pushing hard to get something out by late that evening.

And she was right, of course.  That was my dinner.  And if I made a habit of that diet, she was going to have to call my mom.

I’ll write in another post about diet and brain function with specific regard to attention deficit disorder.  But it doesn’t take a PhD neuroscientist to know that we’re not going to be at our best on peanuts, Nabs, and a Diet Coke all day long.

Meanwhile, here are some general food/brain links for you:

“Eleven Steps to a Better Brain” at The New Scientist.

“Diet and the Brain” at The Society for Neuroscience

“Food for Thought” at The Diet Channel. 

By the way, if one of your New Year’s Resolutions is “Eat Better During the Work Day”, good for you.

If time is valuable to you…it makes sense to look for people who value the same things that you do. This means that you will want to do business with people and companies that respect your time.

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

Amen. Why should we work with people who don’t help us move forward? Such an important question — and yet it seems that many often forget to ask. They (or we?) assume that our surroundings are a given. But they’re not. We can change them.

Lesson 13 — Keep Your Eye on Your Time, Not On Your Watch

Knowing what to do isn’t enough if you haven’t developed the self-discipline to do it.I have known successful salespeople who were drunks, gamblers, liars, thieves…but I have never known a successful person who sat on his ass all day.With all of the Anonymous groups we have for dealing with human weakness, why is it we haven’t organized to combat the most dangerous, expensive, and self-destructive habit of all: wasting time? You can do all those other nasty things and still make a decent living. But if you blow off your nine to fives on useless, time-consuming behavior, you will fail….

It takes energy and self-discipline to sell. Your customer doesn’t care if you make the call. You, the salesperson, have to care. Despite all the psychological gimmicks designed to motivate salespeople to make calls, like bullpens, sales contests, sales meetings, and motivational training, salespeople still contrive to find 1,001 ways to avoid investing the one asset they have that will invariably bring results: their time.

Why?

I wish I knew.

But I do know that a salesperson doesn’t have to be a Lee Iacocca or an Elizabeth Dole to be successful. Just follow one simple rule: Set up a schedule with a fixed number of calls to be made every working day, and complete that schedule. If you make ten stops by only one eyeball-to-eyeball sales call, you’ve made only one call.

…It’s my experience that salespeople who do monitor themselves this way actually give themselves a tougher program to follow than their sales managers give them. That’s because we know ourselves well enough to know that our real capacity far exceeds the average expectations others have for us.

– Harvey Mackay in Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition.

I’ve read two of Mackay’s books that he wrote in ‘88 and ‘90, and I wish he were still writing today. He’s plenty smart and understands all the tiny, gritty, petty, rubber-meets-the-road, less-than-exemplary parts of an executive’s mind. While much of is wisdom applies as well in 2007 as it did in the late 80s, many examples have less force because they draw on business details (like secretaries who take messages) or political examples (Carter and Ford) that are 20+ years old.

That said, there’s plenty of Mackay advice on personal executive management that would be good for almost any ADDexec. For that matter, they’d be good for an executive, even without the attention deficit disorder. Pick up a used copy from Amazon. Dip in. Enjoy. Oh, and quit cringing when you read the references to Carter and Iacocca. You’re not so young you don’t remember them, are you?