Is ADHD Useful in Our Workforce?

Conventional wisdom for the past century has been that managers should look for the “slow and steady” person to fill every position in corporate America - are they wrong?

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification — which the poet or other artist alone can give — reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.
—Walt Whitman, A Backward Glance O’er Traveled Roads

A few years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the front-page, left column, for which I’ve searched in vain ever since (I read it on a plane and left the paper behind). While I can’t quote the article directly, the gist of it was that many corporate personnel people now look for a different personality profile in the people they’re hiring from the criteria used in previous years.

Conventional wisdom for the past century has been that managers should look for the “slow and steady” person to fill every position in corporate America: people who had only one job for a decade or more, and who left that job only because of a natural disaster or other unavoidable reason.

“Job hoppers” — those people who changed employers every year or two — were considered dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. After all, it can take half a year to get someone fully trained and up to speed, and there’s considerable cost associated with that. When they just cut and run after a year or so it leaves a company high and dry, having to spend money to search for another employee, and then start the expensive training cycle all over again.

This article pointed out, however, that view is changing. While people who can’t hold a job for over six months to a year are still considered a poor risk, someone who’s changed jobs every two to four years is now, in many sectors, considered an asset.

According to this article, such people bring with them to the job a breadth of knowledge about differing corporate cultures that is useful. They’ve picked up different strategies and insights at every job, and seen a wider variety of things done right and wrong from which they could learn lessons than the average “slow and steady” person. These insights of theirs can contribute substantially to the corporate culture and the company’s systems or way of doing business.

In this context, that touch of the wanderlust so often associated with ADHD would be a good thing.

Similarly, children and adults who want to surf the Internet, or program and create web pages in such a dynamic environment, must be highly creative and understand the needs of a short-attention-span medium. The entertainment environment in which our young people live is very fast-paced (complete with a TV show called “The Short Attention Span Theater”). It seems that the only part of their lives that still moves at 19th century speed is school.

And even that is changing. With schools increasing reliance on fast-paced media such as computers and video for instruction, being one of those “fast thinking” people may nowadays be as much an asset as a liability.

The first “revolution” was from hunting to farming, 10,000 years ago: the agricultural revolution. The second was about one hundred and fifty years ago — the industrial revolution, fueled primarily by the development of electric power grids in cities and the discovery of internal combustion engines which could exploit a then-cheap source of energy (coal and oil).

Both of these revolutions were well adapted to people with a Farmer mentality. They required linear-thinking skills and the ability to stand in one place for hours a day and put the same bolt on the same nut (or plant the same grain) time after time for years.

But in the past five decades, we’ve witnessed two more revolutions. The first is the service industry revolution. Since the Reagan Revolution gutted unions and moved manufacturing offshore, a huge percentage of our workforce now are employed within the service sector — fast food, entertainment, advertising, marketing, online work, cleaning — compared to just twenty years ago. In this sector, largely driven by salespeople, running at full speed is required. Kids diagnosed as ADHD in school have a blast working in many of these fields, and usually do very well in professions such as sales or marketing.

And the forth revolution—the big one—is the information revolution. More people are employed today in the United States in the business of providing or moving information than are employed in our factories. Fifty years ago, the only people in the information business were librarians, teachers, and writers, but now it’s exploded across the country. One manifestation of this is the proliferation of online services such as social media and YouTube.

In the information age, speed is critically important. Information is accumulating and changing so rapidly that systems such as Telerate, Reuters, and others have adapted to transmit changes in the prices of currencies, for example, worldwide at nearly the speed of light. Fortunes are made and lost in moments, and decisions must be made and acted on with dazzling speed.

Consider how this change in technology and the speed of life is reflected in something as simple and basic as the home. How many contemporary families do you believe would — or even could — sit around the living room for two or three hours a night quietly reading? Or listening to the radio?

While these were the norm one hundred, or even fifty years ago, today’s average family, both parents and children, would run out of the room screaming in boredom after an hour on the first night.

Television producers well know how the attention span of Americans has changed over the past fifty years. The long-winded introductions of Ed Sullivan or skits of Ernie Kovaks have been replaced by shows where the camera never lingers more than seven seconds before the scene is cut to the next shot.

Newspapers reflect this change, too. Compare USA Today (an apt name in this context!) with any newspaper from the early years of the 20th century.

So, suddenly we’re living in an environment uniquely well-adapted to the ADHD individual.

“I love to multitask,” said Bill, a designer for an Atlanta ad agency. “With the computer, I can have three projects going at the same time, and when I get bored with one, I just hop to another.” Work and channel-surfing are taking on an eerie resemblance to each other.

Cultural Anthropologist Cindy Smith is quoted in a recent issue of Information Week as saying that the clues to constructing a successful work environment in the Information Age are found among the hunter-gatherer tribes of the !Kung bushmen who live in Africa’s Kalahari Desert.

“The characteristics of virtual teams are high mobility, very weak notions of property — like having an office — and a high sense of egalitarianism,” she says. “Exactly like the characteristics of a band of hunters and gatherers.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that this milieu has spawned a generation of short-attention-span individuals. They may, after all, be the ones best adapted to the brave new world we’re entering, where the average individual has available with a laptop computer and modem an amount of information ten thousand times greater than the sum total of the knowledge and history of humanity just eighty years ago.

Thus, we find more and more people moving in the direction of work, careers, and a lifestyle which uses and celebrates ADHD, rather than trying to be a tax accountant, groaning under the daily weight of detail and calculations. And increasingly parents are counseling their ADHD children to do the same, even if their school is still stuck in the nineteenth century.