How - Dov Seidman [59]
Let me ask another question (no test this time). In the past week or two, how many times have you opened an e-mail and had one of the following reactions?
• This is not what we agreed to.
• This pisses me off.
• Why did you cc: my boss?
• Are you trying to make me look bad?
• I’m offended.
• I don’t find this all that funny.
• Why are you filling my in-box with this stuff?
Did you forward this e-mail to someone? Did you call a friend or loved one and say, “How’s your day going, honey? Let me tell you about this e-mail I just got.” Or did your annoyance pop into your head again the next time you saw that person and prevent you from relating to them? These things happen all too frequently in the course of a business day. They generate bad feelings, and those feelings accumulate and take their toll. In business, distractions caused by lapses in human conduct reduce everyone’s ability to focus, and thus to function well. It is hard enough to succeed in the competitive world of global business, but if you can’t focus on winning, you don’t stand a chance. One distracting e-mail or phone call can break your concentration on the task at hand.
Such distractions happen all the time. An inappropriate comment by one worker to another during lunch gets escalated into a charge of sexual harassment. The entire team and the focus of the managers immediately get diverted into an investigation. Relationships that were easy and cordial become strained and formal, and productivity quickly suffers.
Distraction can be quantified in all sorts of ways, some anecdotal—like the loss of productivity one can easily imagine following the wardrobe malfunction—and some scientific. Studies have shown, for instance, that the distraction of talking on a cell phone while you are driving exerts a more powerful negative influence on driving performance than alcohol consumed at the legal limit. Some drivers in one study actually reported that it was easier to drive under the influence than while talking on a cell phone, a powerful testament to the mental resources necessary to balance attention and distraction while pursuing a goal.7
In Chapter 5 we looked at Jenapharm and the University of Michigan Health System and their different approaches to a legal challenge. The time, money, and organizational concentration that go into fighting legal battles are nothing but distraction. People go into business to make things, provide services, solve real problems, create more efficiency, and even better mankind. No one goes into business in order to make better lawsuits. A friend told me a story about a businessman who left an extremely high-paying career selling enterprise software to major corporations in order to strike out on his own.8 With his wife and brother-in-law, he opened a gelato store in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood to sell epicurean Italian ice cream with flavors like lemoncello with basil and chocolate martini. The store was an immediate success, tripling all expectations right out of the gate. But when I asked him how the first month went, he told me they spent almost their entire profit in legal expenses fighting with a litigious neighboring bakery owner about whether the ham-and-cheese croissant they were selling technically qualified as a “sandwich” or a “pastry,