But how? That’s the riddle I have worked on over several decades. In this book I share the answers, represented by the Cycle of Excellence. Its roots go back to ideas that I offered first in my books about ADHD, Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction (books that have sold well over a million copies), and later in a book for parents called The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness.2. But I knew that the method could help organizations as well, especially given how dramatically business conditions have changed in recent years. In 1999 I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review (HBR) called “The Human Moment at Work.”3. By the human moment, I mean face-to-face, in-person communication, as opposed to the electronic moment—communication via e-mail, cell phone, smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and instant messaging. From a biological standpoint, people deprived of the human moment in their day-to-day business dealings are losing brain cells—literally—while those who cultivate the human moment are growing them. Simply put, connecting genuinely with other people makes you smarter, healthier, and more productive.4. Being alone for extended periods reduces your mental acuity.5. Those are medical facts, but facts many managers don’t appreciate or use.
The human moment is the chief supplier of what I call “the other vitamin C,” vitamin Connect. Just as you will get sick and die if you are deprived of the original vitamin C, ascorbic acid, so can you get sick and in fact die if you are deprived of face-to-face, human connections (more on the research that proved this later). This led me to identify what I called the first modern paradox: while we have grown electronically superconnected, we have simultaneously grown emotionally disconnected from each other. Books like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat describe and document our new world and some of the obstacles it poses, not the least of which is loneliness.6. But it is a new kind of loneliness. Modern loneliness is an extraverted loneliness, in which the person is surrounded by many people and partakes of much communication but feels unrecognized and more alone than she’d like to.
In a follow-up HBR article, “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform,” I showed how modern life, due to its speed and a volume of data unprecedented in human history, can gradually overwhelm and suffocate the human brain, extinguishing not only human moments but also neurons in an individual’s cerebral cortex.7. Using my training as a medical doctor to inform the discussion, I described overload and excessive busy-ness as unique, unforeseen traps modern life sets that sabotage people’s best efforts. How strange and ironic it was to see all the supposed “labor-saving devices” actually creating more labor.
The phenomenon of overloaded circuits leads to a second modern paradox: people’s best efforts often fail not because they aren’t working hard enough, but because they are working too hard. The brain has its limits. The tsunami of data comprising modern life can easily flood the brain and rot it. Working hard now becomes like bailing out a sinking boat (or brain) with a can, instead of plugging the leak. Many people try to keep up by frantically processing more and more data, bailing faster and faster even as data pours in, instead of erecting boundaries to prevent the data from gaining entrance without permission.
Both HBR articles provoked a spirited response. I began to hear from businesspeople every week, telling me that I was describing their situations exactly. They were struggling to figure out how to cope with this new electronic world of information overload while in a state of high anxiety amid the pressures of economic decline and globalization. I could also see that as managers contended with speed and overload and the loss of the human connection, they were feeling increasingly powerless. They felt they had no choice but to be crazy busy. They were feeling the pressures of “accountability” and other management techniques, they were facing frequent performance reviews and various kinds of electronic supervision, but they were also feeling unguided and underappreciated. They spoke of feeling left out on various limbs—not in a whining or complaining way, but in a stark and dispirited way. Meanwhile, in some business sectors their unscrupulous bosses were reaping huge profits, making out like bandits.
The day of Dilbert had dawned. Cynicism and loss of faith in organizations grew rampant. Disconnection—from fellow workers, from organizational missions and ideals—was gumming up the Cycle of Excellence. The disconnected, overwhelmed employee was too stressed out to imaginatively engage, and therefore he or she underachieved, unable to reach goals, unable to shine. The cycle was breaking down.
I was not the only person describing the problem, but as a specialist on the mind I was offering a perspective and ideas that businesspeople were increasingly asking me to share, which I did in my book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!8. “The title alone describes me,” read many of the e-mails I received from businesspeople not just in the United States, but around the world. Businesspeople had always been busy—but in this new world, busy had gone ballistic. Thus I went on to write the book in your hands as a guide to achieving peak performance amid the pressures of today’s crazy-busy, fear-filled, often amoral, insecure world. A key message: if managers can begin helping their people to use new technologies properly and to regulate their lives rather than becoming crazy busy, then they can become positively and usefully connected. The unique tools of modern life can lead people to phenomenal success. As Eddie Lampert, chair of Sears Holdings, told me, “Small can be big.”
Fortunately, as management theory has moved away from hierarchical models over the last decades, many businesses have crafted cultures that are low on fear and high on cooperation, and that value innovation over conformity. Agile, matrix-like organizations found at such successes as Google, Wegmans, DreamWorks Studios, and SAS are modeling a new norm. It should come as no surprise that people perform better when they are happy. While we must be prepared to suffer necessary pain in order to achieve our best (“no pain, no gain”), it is hugely counterproductive to suffer unnecessary pain.
Yet even the best, most enlightened modern workplace continues to set traps that create unnecessary pain. Examples: the trap of social isolation, the trap of free-floating fear and insecurity, the trap of information overload, and the trap of a boundary-less, interruption-infested work environment. Managers need a plan to tap into what’s best in their people while minimizing the damage from these common traps.
All of this is to say that what I conceived as a plan to help individuals with ADD or other problematic issues blossomed into a plan to help all people who work in organizations sidestep the damage done by the distractions, interruptions, and pressures of modern life. It became a plan that could help managers help their people achieve at their highest levels.
Adapting the Cycle of Excellence for businesses led me to test my ideas with leaders from various fields. I have interspersed some of their comments throughout the book, set off from the rest of the text, but what I learned from them has informed every page. Here is a partial list of people I interviewed.
• Clay Mathile, who built Iams from a small pet food company into a giant business he sold to Procter & Gamble for $2.3 billion
• Woody Morcott, who was CEO of Dana Corporation, a huge auto parts manufacturer, during its glory years in the 1990s
• David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways and inventor of the electronic ticket
• Eddie Lampert, chair of Sears Holdings Corporation
• Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo Books, Canada’s largest chain of bookstores
• Marshall Herskovitz, Hollywood writer, director, and producer of such films as Shakespeare in Love and Legends of the Fall
• Joseph Loscalzo, Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chair of the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston
• Anna Fels, New York psychiatrist and psychotherapist who specializes in treating high-level executives
• Thomas Shaw, Episcopal