Bill Clinton printed these four words on a big sign he kept in his office throughout the 1992 presidential campaign:

“It’s the Economy, Stupid”

That was the message. That was the focus.  And that, many say, was what got him elected.

Twenty years earlier during his revival at Avis, Robert Townsend hung a sign across from his desk that said:

“Is what I’m doing or about to be doing getting us closer to our objective?”

The sign on a salesman friend’s wall says:

“Twenty calls today.”

Do you need a sign on your wall? What should it say? Action, question, or goal?

Regular folks need reminders from now and then. ADDexecs need reminders all the time. I suspect that action reminders work better than question or goal reminders, because there’s a shorter path between an action message and what we need to be doing. What works for you?

“Accept the fact that there is almost always going to be someone mad at you.”

This is a difficult concept to accept, particularly if, like me, you are a “people pleaser,” or worse still, an approval seeker. Yet I’ve found that if you don’t make peace with this virtual inevitability, it guarantees that you will spend a great deal of time struggling with one of the unfortunate realities of life – disappointment.

– entry No. 55 in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work, by Richard Carlson, Ph.D., 1998.

Adults with attention deficit disorder are particulary sensitive to criticism.* For us, Carson’s advice is doubly useful.

Click here for a full ADDexec review for this book.

*stay tuned for an ADDexecutive article on this topic.

ADDexec summary: Danger Ahead — Entrepreneurs, don’t let employees talk and drive in Entrepreneur magazine, May 2007.

Full article: Cell phones are useful, but pull over if you need to use the phone while you’re driving. Same for your employees — whether or not they have attention deficit disorder. Why worry?  For starters:

Under the doctrine of vicarious responsibility, employers may be held legally accountable for the negligent acts of employees committed in the course of employment. Employers may also be found negligent if they fail to put in place a policy for the safe use of cell phones.

– Insurance Information Institute, February 2007.

The science now verifies that cell phones impair driving performance. States and cities across the US are now prohibiting or limiting cell phone use by drivers. And the courts are awarding ample damages for injuries caused by drivers who were talking on cell phones at the time of an accident. What’s the dollar risk?

In a suit against lumber wholesaler Dykes Industries in December 2001, a Miami jury awarded $21 million to a woman who was severely injured by one of the company’s salesmen involved in an accident while he was talking on his cell phone.

In Pennsylvania, a Smith Barney stockbroker–who was talking on his cell phone on the way to a non-business dinner–hit and killed a 24-year-old motorcyclist. Testimony revealed that the firm expected its employees to make “cold calls” on personal time. The plaintiff alleged that the firm was negligent because it encouraged employees to use cell phones without providing training on the potential hazards and risks.

Smith Barney settled with the victim’s family for $500,000.

And in an action involving a state employee who was allegedly talking on her cell phone when she hit a tourist, causing permanent brain damage, the state was found partially liable and paid $2.5 million.

– California CPA, May 2003.

And of course, those are just the monetary risks — never mind the actual injury to persons and reputation.

Read the Insurance Information Institute article for detailed and current information about US and state laws on corporate cell phone liability.

Promises

Keep them. If asked when you can deliver something, ask for time to think. Build in a margin of safety. Name a date. Then deliver it earlier than you promised.

The world is divided into two classes of people: the few people who make good on their promises (even if they don’t promise as much), and the many who don’t. Get into Column A and stay there. You’ll be very valuable wherever you are.

You might suppose that the higher you go in the ranks of business executives, the more word-keepers you find. My experience doesn’t substantiate this.

– Robert Townsend in Up the Organization: How to stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits. 1970.

Townsend wrote this book shortly after leaving Avis, which he had converted from a nothing company to the prominent (and profitable) “We Try Harder” No. 2 to Hertz.

Most of his book focuses on the corporate world in which we suffer from or flee. The post above, though, points directly at us as frequent culprits. Adults with attention deficit disorder are very prone to a quick jump to “yes” — as a way to please others, and as a side-effect of our inability to gauge how long it takes to get things done (either the thing we say “yes” to or the other things we need to do, first). Townsend’s double-advice to us is to (a) break the habit and (b) be careful in trusting that our business partners have broken their habit.

In other posts, I’ll write more on the power of keeping promises (first to ourselves, and then to others). But for now, I’ll just point you to Amazon where you can buy a used copy of this out-of-print book from just $1.26: Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits

Business travel and the ADDexec: On the plus side, you get to move around a lot (except when you’re sitting mid-row in coach class), see a bunch of new things, and meet a bunch of new people. On the down side, there are a million more opportunities to be late, get distracted, and forget stuff at the home office.

Anyone have some good tips for making an ADDexec’s travel go a little easier?

Here are some standbys to get us started:

* keep a full toiletry kit packed and ready at all times.

* keep said toiletry kit next to your (high quality) suitcases.

* make a re-usable spreadsheet for your packing list remember/plan for what items you need to pack. Mine has sections for: work clothes, leisure clothes, outerwear (coats, shoes), toiletries, meds, personal electronics, work equipment, and work files.

* use the packing list as a checklist for packing up.

* make three copies of your passport and drivers’ license: one goes with your suitcase (in case you lose your wallet and need to tell authorities who you are), one goes to your assistant or a trusted peer at the home office, and one stays at home. Oh, and include those “call if your card is lost or stolen” phone numbers for your bank and credit cards.

* don’t schedule as many meetings as you think you can fit in. You can’t.

* if you’re driving to the airport but won’t use your keys while you’re traveling, get a good clip to attach your keychain to your luggage when you’re not carrying them around.

* don’t try to supervise your home office while you’re on the road. You can’t. So give someone else a chance, for Pete’s sake.

* leave your parking slip in your car before you head for the gates (why carry it around while you travel?) and write down where you park your car at the home airport!

* give yourself extra time to get to appointments.  Sure, it’s no fun to sit in a client’s reception area while you wait for your meeting time to finally roll around.  But guess what’s even less fun?

* always put your airline ticket, passport, and wallet in the same place(s) when you travel. That way you won’t do the “where’s my ticket?” pocket-patting Macarena at every security check.

* make an online backup of your itinerary, ticket info, and other useful info if you can do so safely. For example, you can mail your info to a free webmail account (like gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail), or you can scan them and leave them as graphic files on a hidden or password-protected site.

OK, so those are the easy tips. What have you got?

Ideas and mental notes show up when they want — they don’t wait until we’re sitting at a desk with a pen and paper to write them down.* Some ADDexecs carry a small voice recorder to capture their flyabout thoughts.** But before you go shopping, did you know you probably have one in your pocket, already?

Most new cell phones have a voice-recording feature that will work fine for notes up to several minutes long - plenty of time for most ideas that hit us while we’re wandering around town. Some cell phones don’t have a dedicated voice-recording function but do have a small video camera with audio. As long as your chin doesn’t mind being on camera, this function works fine as a short voice recorder.

For convenience, figure out how to get the fastest access to your phone’s voice recorder. My modest Samsung D-807 has a programmable “hot key” function that let’s me get to the voice recorder with one click. The convenience makes it more likely I’ll use the thing (and to start recording before I forget what I’m planning to remember), and also makes it less dangerous for using while driving.

As long as I can remember to check my recordings every evening, the voice recorder is a great way for keeping my brain free for other tasks, instead of occupied with remembering the little and big things that I need to track each day.

———–

*”Reminder — set alarm clock for early tomorrow: breakfast meeting with John.”

**”Hey, here’s a brilliant idea: wouldn’t it be great if we partnered with the Jenson PR Agency and Cassilly Design to make a small marketing cooperative for joint-referrals and occasional team projects? I should call them to see if they want to meet next week before the Venture Capital conference.”

If I’m not at my computer when I make a commitment to do something or be somewhere, I usually ask the other party to “please email a confirmation so I’ll have it at my computer and can plug it into my calendar. Otherwise, I might forget.”

Because this has the tinge of “asking somebody to do my work for me,” it’s easier to do with peers or people who feel beholden to me (i.e., subcontractors, people I’m doing a favor for, etc.). But I find that clients are willing to do this, too — especially when I make it clear that they’re doing both of us a favor when they help me remember.

Naturally, this technique works particularly well when I’ve been asked (or have volunteered) to do a favor for someone else. If they forget (or don’t get around) to emailing a reminder to me, I’m 100% off the hook for doing the favor. And for an ADD-people-pleaser who volunteers too often, this workload reduction by attrition can be a real joy.

“I am inspired.
You are inconsistent.
He is flighty.”

How do you label yourself and your ADD?

And how do you label attention deficit disorder in others? Is your method fair? Is it useful?

Names and labels have power. Fortunately, we have the power to decide what we call things.

For naming and labeling our ADD actions, I think it’s more important to be constructive than it is to be consistent. Use the name or label that’s helpful at the moment — whether that label is praiseworthy or critical.

And take a tip from parenting books and relationship books — label the action and not the person (if you need to label, at all).

Just for Today: see if you can give five unique and sincere expressions of praise to the people you work with.

Write them down.  Count them.  Make sure you get to 5.

Sincere praise is a gift.  It’s the gift of noticing something good.  It’s the gift of letting someone know that you noticed.  And it’s the gift of taking the time to tell them, with at least some unique detail, just what you saw and why you liked it.  It isn’t just "Nice presentation, Jim," as you rush out the door to your next meeting.  But maybe "Nice presentation, Jim.  I appreciate how you helped us get clear on the risk/opportunity options for changing production line B.  I’m glad you didn’t gloss over that part before addressing the rest of the agenda."

This attention to detail is extra important for the ADDexec who can often appear distracted in the eyes of their staff and colleagues.  I once heard a businessman say about another, "Pete is so ADD — I don’t think he’s heard a word I’ve said in the last ten years."  When you give good praise, you’re not only doing something right — you might be helping yourself out of a hole you didn’t even know you’d dug.

And one last thing about giving sincere praise to your "subordinates."  Done right, it lets them know that you know you need them.   That message of intelligent humility is a communication worth having.

"You won’t see how to do it until you see yourself doing it…  Many of us hold ourselves back from imagining a desired outcome unless someone can show us how to get there.  Unfortunately, that’s backward in terms of how our minds work to generate and recognize solutions and methods."

–David Allen in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, chapter three, which cites some decades-old research on how our brains work.

In a business context, the above quote recognizes the importance of having both a Vision and a Business Plan.  We ADDexecs — with our natural ability to visualize many wonderful scenarios — have no shortage of Visions to dream about.  However, we can quickly run into two new challenges: (1) choosing which Vision we’re willing to focus on and work toward and (2) hobbling ourselves by saying, "oh, it’s just another dream, just like all the other dreams I’ve had but never succeeded at." 

Left unmanaged, these two attention deficit disorder hindrances can keep us from moving forward.  Thus the importance of business analysis and a business plan.  Analysis doesn’t answer all questions, but it does give us a chance to see which Visions are more important to us, and which Visions appear most viable.  A business plan forces us to examine our commitment to a single Vision and lets us find out how we can make it real. 

And if we commit, we have an answer to our ADDexec selves when our impulses tempt us elsewhere.  "Sorry, impulse," we can say, "I’ve got a plan and I’m committed."