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This Scientist Is Studying How ADHD Can Help Entrepreneurs Succeed

6/29/2017

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This Scientist Is Studying How ADHD Can Help Entrepreneurs Succeed

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Keith Lemer remembers being a third-year student at Syracuse University’s Business school when his professor handed him a 700-page textbook that, to Lemer’s mind, looked like it would take a lifetime to get through. He’d wanted to read the material and write the subsequent term paper, but his mind wouldn’t cooperate. As the deadline approached, the young man’s attention kept snapping back to a printed fraternity directory he’d recently seen on a visit to Arizona State University. He simply couldn’t control his impulse to begin work on a Greek Directory of his own. Eventually he just gave in, and–instead of writing–built a new one that turned into a thriving business before the end of the semester.

Keith Lemer

“Everyone is lining up to turn in their papers,” Lemer says. “I told the professor: ‘Hey I started a business and I’ve already sold $50,000 in ads at 50% margin.'” The professor was impressed. He told Lemer he had done excellent work, but then failed him for not following directions. Lemer would go on to turn the project that got him an F (which he changed to a D after some cajoling), into a thriving multi-campus business. Today, he is the CEO of WellNet Healthcare, a $150 million a year health insurance provider.

Lemer’s story is typical of what Syracuse researcher Johan Wiklund found drives those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) into successful entrepreneurial endeavors. They get hyperfocused on a problem that captures their attention, especially when the tasks they “should” be working on seem boring or impossible to a less-than organized mind. When that hyperfocus leads them to some measure of success, they are told that their achievements are not welcome. So they set out on their own. Not so much because they intended to be entrepreneurs, but because their consistent habit of acting without thinking nudges them onto their own path.

Wiklund says understanding this habit is key to understanding ADHD in entrepreneurship. Double booked appointments. Projects started that can’t possibly be finished. Commitments quickly made, but then just as quickly forgotten. These are the maddening downsides of this behavioral approach. But Wiklund says that acting more implusively may give ADHD individuals a sizable advantage when it comes to entrepreneurship. “Those with ADHD tend to spur themselves into action regardless of uncertainty,” Wiklund told me. “An impulsive inability to wait comes with a willingness to take risk. The [ADHD entrepreneurs] I studied struggle. But if they had a chance to be like everyone else, none of them would take it.”

Wiklund says that in extremely uncertain environments, neurotypical entrepreneurs risk getting stuck trying to gather enough data, mitigate risk, and predict an ultimately unpredictable situation. As the stakes get higher, they often got locked into a mode of endlessly thinking without acting. Wiklund found that often ADHD entrepreneurs follow a “logic of impulsivity” in which they think more about how right an action feels internally.

Johan Wiklund with PhD students.

“If you always make decisions on the fly, you make a lot of mistakes,” Wiklund says. “And you learn from your failures, so you become very good at operating this way. You develop an ability to rapidly read a situation and quickly choose a course of action.”

Wiklund’s research is groundbreaking because while there’s long been anecdotal evidence that entrepreneurs often have ADHD, the evidence to back it up has been almost non-existent. He says a major event in his personal life led him to fill the gap.

“Five years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD,” Wiklund says. “It explained some of my problems, but I’m also a successful guy. I began to wonder if there might be positive traits that go with these so-called problems.”

So Wiklund began to interview entrepreneurs. One of those he studied, whom he calls Mary, says she often finds herself in unexpected situations, meeting with people she doesn’t recognize about topics she isn’t prepared for. But after so much exposure to these challenges, she says she has come to enjoy improvisation and gets a rush from facing the unexpected. High pressure pitches, difficult conversations and shifting strategy are less emotionally and cognitively taxing for Mary than they would likely be for others. This makes people like Mary extremely effective, Wiklund says, in startup phases of a business. Those advantages can dissipate as a company grows, becomes more bureaucratic and loss tolerant of improvisation.

WellNet’s Lemer has also learned to turn manage and even gain advantage from his non-typical ways of operating. I found him to be overflowing with enthusiasm and confidence. But he says he struggled mightily as a student until at 20, he was diagnosed with ADHD.

“I wear it as a badge of honor and I use it as a point of authenticity to connect with my team and my clients.” [Photo: Maria_Galybina/iStock]“I have to work very hard to be Keith Lemer, the put together CEO,” he says. “Inside I often feel ongoing chaos.” He says it takes effort not to talk a mile a minute, not to show impatience or to tune out in meetings when he gets bored. But he says his ADHD also allows him to hyperfocus when he needs it and to shrug off the inevitable failures he experiences.

Lemer says there are two things that make gleaning advantage from the disorder possible. The first, is honesty. “I don’t hide it,” he says of his ADHD. “I wear it as a badge of honor and I use it as a point of authenticity to connect with my team and my clients.” Lemer’s on to something: Because they’ve often been punished or devalued starting at school, ADHD entrepreneurs can be defensive and secretive about their weaknesses. Being honest, Wiklund’s found, allows team members to acknowledge both the gifts and challenges an ADHD boss or colleague presents, and to take breakdowns in follow through or communication less personally

Lemer’s second success factor was finding close collaborators who give him honest reflection and offer strengths where he has weaknesses. Indeed, Wiklund found that many entrepreneurs with ADHD struggle to accept help filling in for weaknesses they won’t admit to having which can lead to failure as a business matures.

ADHD occurs in about 5% of the population. But Wiklund’s research indicates that if you work in entrepreneurial endeavors your chance of having ADHD or working closely with someone who does is far higher. Thus, it is every organization’s interest to learn to manage ADHD’s downsides and harness the advantages that Wiklund has taken from the realm of rumor into solid science. This is particularly important now when standard operating procedures and long-held best practices are quickly becoming obsolete. Flexible thinking that is comfortable with improvisation and unpredictable situations is an increasing advantage–an advantage that may make the next generation of entrepreneurs more neurodiverse than those that have come before.

Jonah Sachs is a cofounder and partner at Free Range, a purpose-driven design and innovation firm. He is the author of Winning the Story Wars and the upcoming book Unsafe Thinking, which will be published in spring 2018.

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via Fast Company http://ift.tt/1cEtZb6

June 29, 2017 at 04:09PM

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It's easy to forget how dependent the average person is on the international shipping and freighting industry. About 90% of the products bought by consumers are imported, creating an industry worth a whopping trillion dollars and about 7.5% of the US GDP is spent on logistics.

Simply put, freight drives the global economy at deep, essential level.

While this industry is crucial to our everyday lives, it is also one of the world's most old-fashioned, the most far behind the times, and in dire need of digital transformation.

Many transactions between vendors and carriers are manual and business is regularly conducted using email correspondence or, in the more perilous cases, pencil and paper. The industry is largely based on old relationships between vendors and freight forwarders, granting a huge advantage to long-standing companies with decades of experience, even a century.

All of this has created intransigent barriers for new competition and innovation within the market.

Over the past couple decades, technology has been deployed to innovate and modernize many industries, even revolutionize them. Yet relative to other industries, international shipping has managed to resist such trends and remain a traditional and opaque.

Zvi Schreiber's Freightos may very well be the startup we were waiting for.

Moving Freight Into the Future

Freightos is bringing a marketplace to vendors. Schreiber studied the success of passenger travel and the retail industry and wanted to apply his findings to modify the world of freight.

Similar to Expedia and Booking.com, Freightos serves as a concierge marketplace, providing quotes for services from many transportation vendors and international freight customers and enabling instant booking. Leveraging its software and http://ift.tt/2jr23w9platform economics, Freightos has the ability to bring freight quoting into the digital age.

Before Freightos, shipping vendors were obligated to call up freight forwarding companies to collect individual quotes on making shipments, a painstaking and extremely time-consuming process. Putting together quotes for shipping customers could take as long as three days, sometimes longer, with no guarantee the transaction will even be executed.

Schreiber recognized this massive pain point and saw his opportunity to innovate and bring new efficiencies to the market.

In Freightos's early development stages, Schreiber realized that providing pricing information automatically would be necessary for vendors to view this online marketplace as practical and worth their time.

Bearing that in mind, in 2012, Schreiber and his team focused their efforts on building software that helps freight forwarders automate price quotes.

Fast forward five years and Freightos's team still receives over 200 spreadsheets a day from thousands of carriers to keep their prices current. Each sheet is entered into a database and integrated with the API, allowing for quicker pricing and rate estimations based on over 350 million unique price points from thousands of forwarders.

Schreiber explained that this is one of the hardest parts of the entire process, that ingesting thousands of massive spreadsheets with specific data for thousands of carriers is quite the heavy lift.

As well, the company needs to consistently refine its routing algorithm, converting various carriers' availabilities into actual door-to-door routes and according estimates.

Thanks to Freightos, importers and exporters can efficiently browse through freight forwarders online and quickly compare quotes to find the best deal available. This new marketplace approach has increased competition amongst freight forwarders due to the increased transparency and ease of accessing information.

Another huge advantage offered by Freightos: participating carriers and forwarders gain a fresh, significantly cheaper online channel for organic sales.

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Changes on the Horizon

As Freightos grows and onboards more regular customers, freight forwarders and carriers must continually improve their services and lower their prices in order to compete. Otherwise, they'll be undercut and left out of this new version of the freight industry.

Freightos also offers guidance to freight forwarders, offering feedback on their pricing and how it ranks against competitors, which allows freight forwarders the opportunity to make adjustments that will ultimately benefit both their business and their customers.

For now, Schreiber plans on keeping Freightos a neutral marketplace. Listings in the marketplace are ranked solely on price, service, and transit times. No specific freight forwarders receive any special favor and there's no advertising for higher positioning in the search results.

The positive competition that Freightos fosters in freight forwarding is sure to bring more changes downstream and deliver better results for shipping as a whole.

Freightos currently serves over 20,000 users on its platform and Schreiber hopes to continue increasing this number. Schreiber is well aware that the technology is only so important. The real asset that Freightos provides is the value it offers to the users, which it's done over 18 million times.

Schreiber originally did not intend for Freightos to become a freight forwarder itself and still doesn't. Rather, he envisions a platform in which vendors and carriers could easily connect and transact. In the near future, Freightos is planning to extend its services to allow its customers to track individual containers.

Given its trajectory, Freightos's marketplace for freight forwarding is well on its way to becoming a household name in the international shipping.