Getting the Attention You Need

Business leaders can’t accomplish anything if their employees aren’t paying attention; to achieve long-term and short-term corporate goals, leaders need their people to focus in a sustained way on those goals. And lately, a lot of people’s attention is wandering. It’s easy to see why. Bill Gates’s dream that we’d have all the information we want at our fingertips has come true with a vengeance. Intranets, software applications, and portals continually wash tsunamis of information onto our desktops. The average manager receives more than 100 voice mail and e-mail messages a day. It would be bad enough if all this information were flung at a steady state audience, but in many organizations, staffs are leaner than ever. More information, fewer people—it’s no wonder that so many companies are on the verge of an acute attention deficit disorder. Over the past several years, we’ve studied attention management, looking at how well—and how poorly—it is practiced in traditional organizations and on the World Wide Web. We’ve analyzed attention management using three lenses: the economic, the psychobiological, and the technological. One overarching lesson has emerged from our research: leaders today need to pay more attention to attention because it is widely misunderstood and widely mismanaged. People may be paying attention to all the information coming at them but rarely in the ways that leaders would want or expect. Leaders today need to pay more attention to attention because it is widely misunderstood and widely mismanaged. In this article, we’ll explore the economic, psychobiological, and technological perspectives on attention management, and we’ll identify the operating principles they suggest. Interestingly, while attention management has been around for thousands of years—think Moses on Mount Sinai or Winston Churchill in the darkest hours of World War II—some of the most powerful tactics we’ve observed come from the new adventurers on the Web. Not all, however. Lessons from the advertising, television, and film industries can also help executives as they try to manage one of their scarcest resources: the full engagement of employees’ minds. (See the sidebar “Lessons from the Attention Industries.”) Lessons from the Attention Industries Some industries, such as advertising, television, film, and print have grown up learning to capture and sustain attention. Managers in other industries can benefit from what they’ve learned. Advertising. Advertising, which is about very little else but attracting and sustaining attention, offers managers three important points to ponder. First, good advertisers measure everything. Devices that measure how many viewers are watching a TV program were developed primarily for the benefit of the advertising industry, for example. A good agency knows exactly which ads pull in which consumers, how much those consumers spend, and what their return rates are. We’ve only started to learn to measure employees’ attention; getting better at it will pay off in a big way. (See the sidebar “Measuring Attention.”) Second, agencies have long counseled that an advertising message should be delivered through multiple media—TV, newspapers and magazines, billboards, video screens at gas station pumps, and so on. Internet banner advertising is in that mix. If senior managers want to get an important message across to their people, they also need to employ multiple media. Executives at the software company Symantec, for example, received complaints from employees about poor internal communications—which were primarily by e-mail. They concluded that crucial messages should be sent through executive speeches, e-mail, paper memos, and express mailings of documents and videotapes to employees’ homes. And third, advertisers are virtually unanimous on the importance of a clear message, repeated often. If you’re going to get consumers’ attention and change their behavior, it’s got to be obvious what you want them to do. Companies, too, must focus attention on a small set of clear ideas. CEO Jack Welch is extremely effective at focusing the attention of GE employees on a single critical topic. This year, it’s “destroy your business.com,” an initiative to understand how GE business units can compete using electronic commerce. Previously, Welch had targeted improved quality through the use of Six Sigma standards, increased inventory turns, and the elimination of unnecessary work. Like a good advertiser, he repeats the message in speeches, in one-on-one meetings with managers, in annual reports, and in press interviews. A GE employee who doesn’t want to heed the message would have a tough time avoiding it. Television. Television, which is still stickier than the Internet overall—the average American watches TV for three hours and 26 minutes per day—offers some lessons of its own. Take program scheduling: a network’s promising new shows are typically slated to follow proven winners. Even the highly structured, predictable nature of TV programs over time is a factor in managing viewers’ attention. Learning from that, executives in companies should schedule their communications at regular intervals—for instance, sending e-mails that summarize the previous week’s performance every Monday at 9 AM . Television programs also rely heavily on narrative and storytelling. Their success may account for the rise of storytelling in business. 3M, for example, has had great success adapting its strategic planning process to a storytelling format. (For more details, see Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromley’s “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning,” HBR May–June 1998.) Film. In darkened theaters around the world, we sit like zombies, our attention totally focused on projected images and recorded sounds. One of the most important lessons from the film industry is that people actually like the “captive attention” environment of the theater—as long as they are entertained. This bodes well for those who want to manage attention, though it also shows how high the entertainment value of a message must be to capture people’s focus. Movies also illustrate the importance of age segmentation in attention management. Attention allocation is different for people at different ages and from different environments. Web companies like iTurf and Yahoo! are just now beginning to focus on the attention market for teens and preteens, which movies have monopolized for years. Companies must be careful about segmenting their internal communications according to age because of discrimination issues, but the crafty communicator might avoid that problem by segmenting according to level or rank. If you’re sending a message to lower-level employees who are likely to be young, make the communication as flashy and colorful as you can. For higher-level executives, you may still get away with black-and-white text. Print. Magazines and books prosper when they embrace the “cult of personality,” glorifying authors and the subjects they cover. In 1999, there were more new magazines about media personalities than in any other category, and the best-selling books were by celebrity authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham. The literature on leadership is full of discussions about the virtues—and problems—of charismatic CEOs. Steve Jobs at Apple, Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, and Ross Perot at EDS and Perot Systems demonstrated the attention-getting potential of a “star” leader. Hewlett-Packard is attempting to make its latest CEO, Carly Fiorina, an executive celebrity by featuring her in TV ads. And managers inside the company say she’s getting more internal attention than any CEO has since HP’s founders because she’s orchestrated this major communications campaign. The Economics of Attention Is it hyperbolic to suggest that we’re living in an attention economy? Not in our opinion. Economics, by definition, is the study of how whole societies allocate scarce resources. The scarcest resource for today’s business leaders is no longer just land, capital, or human labor, and it certainly isn’t information. Attention is what’s in short supply. And human attention certainly behaves like an economic good in the sense that we buy it and measure it. On an individual level, we’re deeply aware when we don’t have enough of it—which suggests the first lesson of attention management. Manage attention knowing that it’s a zero-sum game; there’s only so much to go around. People may not think of their own attention as a scarce economic good, but they certainly act as though it is. They don’t want their time, or their attention, wasted. The best Web sites have capitalized on this principle. The stickiest sites—meaning the URLs that visitors tend to click on, stay at for a while, and return to time and time again—provide high returns on attention investment, usually measured in time savings for the user. For instance, Yahoo! is a hugely successful search engine because its human-based approach to classifying sites yields fewer irrelevant “hits” than a computer-based approach and promises a less complex search. More generally, our research suggests that Web users value portals not because they want access to many sites but because the portals provide efficient access to the few sites that interest them. And when Web sites sell products or services, users tend to reward easy transactions, straightforward navigation, and access to a variety of goods. Again, the attraction for users is a high return on attention investment, and managers at sticky sites like Amazon.com and eBay actively strategize toward this goal. The most important implication of the zero-sum rule for managers at traditional organizations is that they need to limit the number of internal programs that compete for employees’ attention. We can’t overstate the importance of this point. One Harvard professor’s informal survey suggested that the average company has more than 16 major initiatives under way at any given time—for instance, implementing new technologies or restructuring a functional unit. Many businesspeople we speak with complain of “initiative fatigue” and say they just can’t pay attention to all of them. Wise leaders understand the danger of spreading attention too thin. When they introduce a new initiative, they retire an old one. It’s as simple as that. For example, when BP acquired Amoco and then Atlantic Richfield, senior executives were concerned that managers would be distracted by too much information, at a time when oil prices were very low. So BP halved the number of its IT applications to cut down on the information those applications produced. But what happens if several strategic imperatives cry out for attention at once? This happened recently at Clarica, formerly Mutual Life of Canada, a large Canadian insurance company that went through two major changes, one in 1998 and one in 1999. The company had announced its intention to demutualize—in other words, to change its ownership by policyholders to ownership by public stock. This is a complex and difficult transition, involving regulatory, financial, and customer relationship changes. Insurance companies prepare for it for months and years, and it monopolizes senior management’s attention. A few months into the demutualization process, another major opportunity emerged. Metropolitan Life, the largest U.S. insurer, decided to sell its Canadian business and announced that it was taking bids. The possibility of buying the MetLife business, which would increase by half Clarica’s customers and assets, presented an “attention crisis” for CEO Bob Astley and the executive team. They didn’t feel they had enough senior management attention left to undertake the deal’s due diligence process, make the bid, and integrate the business with Clarica if their bid was successful. The demand for attention dictated the need for a new supply of it. Astley and his team decided to deputize 150 second-level managers to work on different aspects of the MetLife acquisition. Hubert St. Onge, senior vice president of strategic resources, led the effort. As a result, the senior team continued to focus most of its attention on the demutualization process. Every Saturday, they met for several hours to be briefed on the acquisition. After Clarica’s bid was accepted, an Integration Management Office was formed to merge the two organizations; the office required little of senior management’s attention. Eventually, both the demutualization process and the MetLife acquisition were completed, and the acquisition and integration of the new business were completed ahead of schedule. Those successes can be traced back, in large part, to senior management’s intelligent allocation of its own attention. The Psychobiology of Attention Seeing attention purely through an economic lens distorts its reality somewhat. Economics, after all, assumes that rational actors make deliberate investment choices to optimize their returns. In reality, much of what determines where people invest their attention is below the level of pure reason. Indeed, our research suggests that one of the most important factors for gaining and sustaining attention is engaging people’s emotions. One of the most important factors for gaining and sustaining attention is engaging people’s emotions. Allow us to predict one specific behavior, based on the psychobiology of attention: no matter what business activity you are involved in—sitting in a meeting, making a decision, or reading the Wall Street Journal—you would stop that activity immediately if a snake slithered into the room. Over millennia of focusing on life-and-death issues, our nervous systems have evolved to pay attention to some things more than others. Aspiring attention managers should be at least as attuned to the psychobiology of attention as they are to its economics. There are four linked lessons from psychobiology. People are hardwired to fight for survival; use that to your benefit. All primates are biologically programmed not simply to fear snakes but to pay close attention to them. Web designers and business managers alike can use that natural reaction to get and hold onto people’s attention. On-line grocery shopping in Brazil illustrates the point. Brazilians became so accustomed to hyperinflation over the years that when they got a paycheck, they’d immediately buy vast quantities of groceries. Who knew how much the check would be worth in one day, let alone after a whole month? Even though inflation has been tamed, Brazilians still buy groceries in huge quantities. On-line retailers there have noted this survival reaction and have exploited it. By far, the largest e-commerce category in Brazil is grocery sales: they constitute 39 % of total e-commerce in Brazil versus 3.4 % in the U.S. In organizations, the psychobiology of survival is obvious in the strategies managers use to get and keep workforce attention. The threat of corporate demise—and the consequent loss of jobs and livelihoods—focuses attention on the need to change. But that attention must be managed carefully, lest people become paralyzed by fear rather than attentive to it. Employees find new jobs, or they hunker down and get ready to change. Either way, you can be sure they are paying attention. When Japanese automakers threatened to drive Ford out of business in the early 1980s, senior managers and employees were motivated to pay attention to quality and efficiency in a way they never had before. Suddenly product and process design became high priorities. By the end of that decade, an MIT study rated Ford facilities as the highest-quality plants in the world. In short, scaring your employees is a great way to get their attention. But make sure the threat is genuine, and don’t use this tactic too often. If you do, your employees will stop believing that the threat is real. People are naturally competitive; use that to your benefit, as well. Competitive urges are part instinct, part cultural conditioning, and eminently exploitable. Sports and investment Web sites play to those urges indirectly by providing the latest scores, stock prices, and predictions. And some of the stickiest Web sites involve outright competition. For instance, at Lycos’s Gamesville.com, participants compete against thousands of other players who are simultaneously logged on to the Web site. Players return to the site again and again to have fun, to beat their neighbors at backgammon, and to win prizes. Even though the prizes are small—typically $ 1 to $ 5—Lycos’s executives think they’re one key to the site’s success. Competition can also focus people on a business goal. There’s no question, for instance, that the Malcolm Baldrige Award has helped employees at quality-minded organizations keep their eyes on the prize. The concept can be taken too far if internal competition—to be the unit that creates most value, for instance—begins to produce divisiveness. But the chances are good that a bit of rivalry will make the work more compelling to everyone. Smart leaders find ways to keep employees laser-focused on their business competitors, too. During a period of economic doldrums for Motorola during the mid-1990s, executives in one cellular-phone division were encouraged to carry a pager that periodically announced stock prices for Motorola, Ericsson, AT&T, and Nokia. Every time a competitor’s stock price jumped significantly, pagers would beep or vibrate and everyone in the room would know they were in a tough battle—and that the stock market was giving Motorola’s competitors a lot of credit. At the time, the pagers didn’t go off much for Motorola stock increases. But partly because of employees’ competitiveness, Motorola experienced rapid shareholder increases the next two years. Don’t let distractions keep people away from your core message. If you want to catch a raccoon, show him a shiny object to distract him. People, like raccoons, are infinitely distractible, and that’s the biggest problem in this age of attention deficit. On the Web, distractibility cuts both ways: banner advertising, for example, is the number one source of revenue, and it’s also the number one distraction for users. One of the most popular banner ads of 1999 featured an animated monkey quickly bounding across the top of the screen. If you “punched the monkey” by clicking on it, you were whisked to a gambling site. Many people found the manic monkey an irresistible target. Great news for the gambling site—but mixed news for the sites running that ad. In most organizations, the worst distraction is one we mentioned previously—the multiple internal programs that compete for employees’ attention. But they’re hardly the only distraction. For example, when the Chemical and Manufacturers Hanover banks agreed to merge several years ago, employees at both banks were justifiably concerned about their futures. Bruce Hasenyager, an IT executive at Chemical, noticed that productivity was slumping because employees were gossiping and exchanging rumors. He created “Rumor Mill,” a discussion database that allowed any IT employee to describe a rumor that he or she had heard about the merger. Hasenyager promised that he would address any rumor about which he had information. While some executives were uncomfortable with the discussion, Hasenyager believed that deflating all the speculation made it easier for employees to get back to work. Other companies attack distractions by offering to help employees with their personal chores. For example, concierge services are available to stand in line at the registry of motor vehicles or to pick up dry cleaning so that overextended employees can focus on their work. People want to feel engaged, so help make that happen. If you can get people to invest something of their own, they’re going to be more committed than if they feel like observers. That’s the main force behind the stickiness of investment sites like Fidelity’s and Schwab’s, event-tracking sites like When.com, and any site that makes heavy use of on-line discussion. Cocreation pulls people in. It makes people feel like they count, and it makes it harder for them to disengage. Personalization and customization are forms of cocreation because they require the site user to invest some time to report their preferences for the type of service they’ll receive. A perfect example is MyYahoo!.com, which allows a sports fan to position sports news at the top of his or her personalized home page, or a homesick expatriate to highlight all the news from Ohio—and requires both of them to share information and invest time with the Web site up front. Amazon.com is often cited as another champion of cocreation, since it relies on reader-submitted reviews to provide other site visitors with rich content. The success of the tactic may actually have more to do with the flattery and recognition that the user doing the posting receives than on the content itself. Amazon also relies on personalization techniques to get users’ attention, beginning with the cheery “Hello John Smith!” that greets John when he logs on. At a deeper level, the site targets returning customers by recommending books or other items based on past purchases. Personalization requires relatively sophisticated technology and a labor-intensive approach to content, which is why more Web sites don’t do it. Yet our research suggests that when people have too much information to process, personalization is one of the most important factors in their choice to attend to one piece of information over another. (See the sidebar “What Kind of Message Gets Attention?”) What Kind of Message Gets Attention? We surveyed 60 executives, asking each of them to track every message they received for one week and to rate how well each message attracted their attention. For the messages that received a high level of attention, we asked about the attributes of the message. Overall, the factors most highly associated with getting their attention, in rank order, were: the message was personalized, it evoked an emotional response, it came from a trustworthy or respected sender, and it was concise. The messages that both evoked emotion and were personalized were more than twice as likely to be attended to as the messages without those attributes. Almost half the messages that got high levels of attention were e-mails, while only 16 % were voice mail messages. Messages in other media grabbed even less attention. Several factors were not correlated with attention impact: whether the message came from a superior, whether the information was new or unusual, and whether the recipient agreed with the sender about the content of the message. Cocreation works inside businesses, too. Employees who have helped to make something happen stay invested, and they stay interested. One of the best examples we’ve discovered is Texas Instruments, whose CEO made it a top priority in 1994 for the company to define its new vision and strategic plan. To ensure that the plan got the attention it deserved, he put not only his strategic leadership team on the hook for it, but also a broader group of vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and other employees. And the process didn’t end there. Once an initial draft was produced, more than 200 other TI executives were invited to participate in shaping it. Senior managers could have just herded this second tier of employees into a large room and asked for comments, but they didn’t. Instead, they orchestrated a series of five-day events for groups of 25 to 30 managers and revealed the draft strategic vision only after two full days of exploring competitive dynamics and explaining the process that resulted in the vision proposal. At that point, participants had the knowledge base and the confidence to offer thoughtful criticisms and recommendations, which were readily incorporated into the final product. One TI executive reported that this inclusive process had multiple benefits. It helped keep the strategic vision alive when the CEO died unexpectedly: “Two or three hundred of us had worked on this. We didn’t want to just move forward with it—we wanted to pick up the pace.” The process also helped TI gain consensus quickly on the divestiture of a financially successful business unit that didn’t fit the strategy. Even the heads of the unit in question, who’d been among the original strategists, agreed with the divestiture. Personalization can also be a powerful tool for getting and holding employees’ attention. At one company, the CEO recently sent each employee a letter at home stating how much revenues needed to increase in the last quarter to meet a growth goal—and exactly how much bigger the individual’s bonus would be if that goal was reached. Previously, only the top people would have received a letter of that kind; it used to be considered too expensive to personalize a mass mailing. Employees overwhelmingly agreed that the letters had focused them mightily on their tasks—and the goals were met. Technologies and Attention Technologies offer extraordinarily rich ways to capture people’s attention. This has been true throughout human history: the Protestant Reformation wouldn’t have happened without the distribution of Bibles, for example, and the French and American revolutions wouldn’t have happened without newspapers. The invention of the printing press made both media possible. Today, businesses use dozens of technologies and media to attract attention. Burson-Marsteller, a global communications firm, prepares both internal and external communications campaigns for its clients. PR has traditionally focused on broadcasting messages outside the company using a variety of media. But now multimedia technologies are being employed to communicate both internal and external messages. Burson has one client, a financial services firm, whose managers concluded that if they wanted to get the attention of analysts, bankers, and traders, e-mail was not enough; communications had to be face to face. The company now uses a combination of worldwide satellite broadcasts and streaming video Web-casts, sometimes with simultaneous translation of the audio stream into multiple languages. The same broadcast may be viewed by investment analysts and employees. Many companies now use worldwide video-conferences to distribute important messages to those who weren’t closely involved in creating them. Sometimes the broadcasts are augmented with anonymous Web chat rooms, in which the participants can say what they really think about their leaders’ messages—and such candid feedback tends to get the leaders’ attention in return. In another example, Hewlett-Packard issues audiocassettes about new initiatives and programs for employees to listen to while they’re commuting. Despite all these potential improvements to communication, we have two cautionary notes about technology and attention. Don’t let technology get in the way. Something that appears to be a great attention-getting technology can be worse than useless if it’s supported by an insufficient infrastructure. Web users outside the United States often talk about whether the country is “awake yet” before logging on, because heavy Internet usage during U.S. daytime hours slows down so many sites. Multiple formats and complex technologies for playing sound and video over the Web may draw attention to a site, but they may destroy its capacity to attention. Similar problems crop up at traditional companies. Managers promoting a new venture or initiative often don’t realize that, even as they are asking people to behave in a new way, they are making it difficult for that to happen. For instance, different e-mail systems and incompatible releases of crucial software programs make it nearly impossible for workers to get up to speed with a new initiative. One German multinational we worked with had launched a knowledge management project designed to let employees and customers share information seamlessly. This initiative was central to the company’s larger goal—to change from a company that sold products into one that sold knowledge-based services. The problem was there were two competing versions of the software the company was using for knowledge management. One, in German, was based in Germany. The other, in English, was global. Neither flourished, partly because nobody could figure out which version of the software to use. Don’t get into a technology arms race. The standard for what gets attention is always being raised; what was dazzling yesterday is boring today. On the Web, for example, it used to be de rigueur to divide the page into browsable sections, or frames, even though the frames were confusing and slow to download. Today, frames are as outdated as hula hoops. The same holds true for company communications. At one point, inserting into a presentation cute clip art of a duck bashing a computer with a sledgehammer could get your audience’s rapt attention—and a few chuckles besides. Now, every person with a computer uses the same goofy clips in their presentations, along with the same artful backgrounds, the same fonts, the same snazzy transitions between slides. If you’re talking about newsletters, everybody’s got the same crisp, PageMaker-supplied, multicolumn formats. Even video is becoming a commodity. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy realized that this kind of arms race was counterproductive and banned PowerPoint presentations at the company. Sustaining Attention Getting employees to stick to important strategic initiatives—and to give those initiatives their undivided attention over time—is crucial to competing successfully today. In discussing the factors that contribute to sustained attention, we’ve focused on elements different from those required for capturing attention in the first place. We should point out that the tactics that lure a Web user to a site for the first time—or an employee to focus on a strategic initiative in the first place—are not the same as the ones that will keep them coming back. Stickiness as measured on the Web is usually a combination of the number of unique visits to the site and the total time spent by the average user across multiple visits, but the factors that create those behaviors are not the same. Measuring Attention The same things that make for sticky Web sites make for sticky business in general because the same conditions of attention deficit prevail. So why has “stickiness” become such a Web-specific buzzword? One simple reason is that the attributes of the Internet make it uniquely capable of measuring stickiness. We believe that attention in a business can be measured, albeit not with the precision that it’s measured on-line. We’ve relied thus far on getting people to report on their own mental processes. We’ve developed the AttentionScape, one of several tools that we’ve used in our research, which maps the way a person allocates his or her attention. It’s based on the fact that there are six types of attention that anyone can give to any issue or item; the six types represent the opposite extremes in three categories. Attention can be voluntary or captive; aversive or attractive; and front-of-mind or back-of-mind. Attention is maximized by appealing to all six types, which isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds. A movie trailer may command your captive attention, because you’re sitting in a dark room and have been shamed into silence, and your voluntary attention, because the preview turns out to be pretty engaging—both at the same time. Employees are most productive when they feel the right mix of stress (what we consider aversive attention) and reward (what we consider attractive attention). You want your employees’ work to have highly engaging front-of-mind elements as well as routine back-of-mind elements. And there should be some parts of the job that they feel they cannot escape and some parts they’re crazy about. The AttentionScape was designed to reveal the type of attention an individual—or a team or a corporation—pays to a particular issue at a given time, using a chart like the one at right. The size of the bubbles indicates the amount of attention devoted to the issue. The X axis plots the amount of captive versus voluntary attention a user experiences. (If they are balanced equally, the attention bubble is at the center of the axis lines.). The Y axis plots front-of-mind versus back-of-mind attention. And the shade of the bubbles indicates attractive attention (darker shades) versus aversive attention (lighter shades). The chart we show here measures responses from Sally B. Goode, an executive at a software company called FloppyTech. Sally answered several questions about her daily tasks and responsibilities, and she reported the time and attention she paid to each. For each task, there is a shaded bubble on Sally’s AttentionScape chart. A reasonable share of her attention is going to innovation—but we were surprised that it wasn’t larger, since that’s the most important part of her job. Business logistics get a lot of her attention, even though they’re not meant to be Sally’s major concern. Teamwork runs a distant third among her attention getters, followed by client and interpersonal issues. The shades on Sally’s chart indicate that she finds most of her work interesting. But almost every item on Sally’s chart is plotted left of the axis line, indicating that her attention to her work is captive—she’s focusing because she feels she has to. And most of the items are in the front-of-mind area of the chart. This means that Sally hasn’t been able to make parts of her job routine. She goes through her day paying close, conscious attention to almost everything, including items that really don’t require—or deserve—such a large chunk of her expensive focus. People who keep everything in front-of-mind attention are easily overwhelmed, overworked, and overwrought. Based on this chart, we can conclude that Sally might need some help directing her attention to FloppyTech’s most pressing corporate issues. The AttentionScape is used in a number of ways: with leadership teams to understand their focus; with potential movie viewers to predict their likelihood of going to any given movie; and within companies to assess the “attention chain” throughout the organization. The charts are simple to create: the user compiles a list of attention items to rate, assesses how much of his or her or the team’s total attention is paid to each item, and then vets out—through the use of analytical statements—the type of attention that is paid to each. While these charts are constructed with mathematical algorithms, the logic is quite simple, and you can map a theoretical AttentionScape without any numbers. (To walk through the process, go to www.attentionscape.net.) In the organizational setting, managers have succeeded all too well in getting that first bite—and the result is that workers everywhere have become as immune to management’s messages as the neighbors of the boy who cried wolf did. The difference between capturing attention in the first place and sustaining it is nothing short of the difference between making a promise and keeping it. It’s far more important to do the latter. Management must set the right example if it wants a focused, committed workforce. The difference between capturing attention in the first place and sustaining it is nothing short of the difference between making a promise and keeping it. In the industrial economy, attention wasn’t the scarce resource that it is today. There were more people to do the same amount of work, or even less work. Business wasn’t as complex and didn’t change as quickly, and knowledge workers weren’t at the core of sophisticated economies. Information was scarce, and so we pursued hardware and software strategies that made vast amounts of information available at every desktop. With an enormous boost from the Internet, we were successful beyond our wildest dreams. Now it’s human attention that’s scarce, and our entire view of business needs to change. When we ask ourselves what’s the constraining factor in the success of new business strategies, marketing campaigns, or knowledge management initiatives, the answer is likely to be attention. In the attention economy, we will have to evaluate every action with regard to how much attention it will consume and how we can get and keep the attention we need.

Getting the Attention You Need

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