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?

I recently hired a graphic designer to create a direct marketing piece for one of my clients.  The designer came up with a nice first draft, which I forwarded to my client so we could review them at the same time.

My client was out of town, so I went ahead and emailed my first comments to the designer.  (”Nice color — how about a font change here?  Oh, and here’s some more copy.  And can you try it with the other proposed logo?”)  You know — I figured that the sooner we started getting her changes, the faster the whole process would go.

Two days later, the client got their comments to me.  (”Great font.  And here’s yet more copy.  And here’s a correction on one line of the original copy.  And can we try a version without the logo?”)

I emailed the comments on to the designer.  And a few moments later I realized that the client  had a typo in their correction.  So I emailed the designer with a fix to that typo (and I labeled the email “high priority” so she’d read it before implementing the client’s erroneous change).    And of course I sent it quickly.  You know, about ten minutes before I remembered that I needed to request yet one more tweak…

Only one thing kept that graphic designer from shooting me — she charges by the hour.

Lesson: no one benefits from having a hundred tweaks requested one-at-a-time as they occur to the tweaker.  My ADD wanted me to deal with each idea as soon as it hit me, and maybe that would have been fine.  But I didn’t need to make the designer deal with each idea as soon as it hit me.  I could have collected them bit by bit into one document, which I could have emailed when it was complete, after I organized and reviewed it.  I’ll do better next time — I promise!

“Don’t Sell Past the Close”

– some anonymous smart person

This isn’t just for salesmen pitching product.  It’s for any executive whose job includes persuading others to do things.

When someone agrees to whatever you’re persuading them to do, stop talking.  Stop giving them more reasons it’s a good idea.  Stop asking them to do it.  They’ve already said yes! What will you gain by talking more?  Probably nothing important.

Meanwhile, there’s a risk you might derail their “yes”.  How? Here are four different ways:

1. you might give them new facts that point them back toward “no”.
2. you might look so eager that they think they can talk you down on price.
3. your lack of realizing that you’ve already made the “sale” may make them doubt your competence and the value of whatever you’re pitching
4. your extra bandwidth demand might just annoy them. I think I’ll stop, now.

Do you have a to-do list with items more than one month old?

Try this for today: find one item you know you’re not going to do, or that you at least know you can live without.  And scratch it out.

I bet your mind will thank you.

Back in the 70s I read a book of study tips for college students.  “If you’re having troubled staying on task with an assignment, promise yourself a reward — like going out for a hamburger — as soon as you get your work done.”

How does this technique sound for a modern executive with attention deficit disorder?  On the one hand, if the promise of a little treat helps us get the job done, great!  We get the job done!  On the other hand, if we make a habit of using extrinsic and unrelated rewards (like hamburgers, or a half-hour of television, or a trip to the beach) to get ourselves to complete a task, will we gradually erode our internal ability to stick with tasks for the simple reason that they’re important?

I suspect that the “hamburger” technique (like hamburgers themselves) are fine if used sparingly, but not as a habit.  In any case, if you use this technique, what’s your “hamburger”?