The best books on ADHD for senior professionals
There are good books on adult ADHD. Almost none is written for the person who runs the place. Here is what to read anyway, and where the shelf runs out.
There is no shortage of good writing on adult ADHD. What there is a shortage of is writing for the person who ended up in charge — the managing director, the partner, the founder, diagnosed late and running a business on a brain the standard advice was never written for. Below are the books I recommend anyway, honestly, and then the gap where the shelf runs out.
Worth your time
Driven to Distraction, Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. The book most people are pointed to first, and rightly. It is where the modern understanding of adult ADHD was popularised, and it is still one of the clearest accounts of what the condition actually is. Read it to understand the wiring; it will not tell you how to chair a board with it.
ADHD 2.0, Hallowell and Ratey again, some thirty years on. Shorter, updated with newer science, and more practical about strategies. A sensible next step once the diagnosis has sunk in.
How to ADHD, Jessica McCabe. Warm, practical, and genuinely useful on the executive-function basics: starting, remembering, finishing. It is pitched at adult life in general rather than senior work in particular, but the foundations are sound and kindly put.
Faster Than Normal, Peter Shankman. An entrepreneur’s take, brisk and energetic, that treats ADHD as an advantage to be harnessed. I do not share the framing — I think the costs are realer than this book lets on — but if you want optimism with a practical edge, it delivers it.
The ADHD Guide to Career Success, Kathleen Nadeau. The closest thing on the shelf to a workplace manual, and strong on the mechanics of holding a job with this condition. It speaks to the employee navigating a career more than to the executive redesigning the work around themselves.
Scattered Minds, Gabor Maté. Not a work book at all, but the most humane account of where the emotional weather comes from. Worth it if the late diagnosis has left you with more feelings than answers.
Where the shelf runs out
Read all of them and you will notice the same thing I did. They are written either for adult ADHD in general, or for the person coping inside somebody else’s system — the employee, the student, the struggler. Almost none assumes you are the one holding the diary, setting the meetings, managing the people, and able to change the conditions rather than merely survive them. And a fair few lean, to varying degrees, on the idea that ADHD is secretly a gift, which is the one note this senior reader tends to find least useful, because it is not honest about the bill.
That gap is the reason I wrote Bandwidth. It assumes seniority. It starts from acceptance rather than debate, it does not pretend the condition has no costs, and it is about using the control that comes with rank — the Inversion — to run your energy, your meetings, your messages and your team on terms that fit the brain. If the books above are how you come to understand this condition, it is the one I could not find to tell me how to lead with it. About the book.