christensen how will you measure your life

8/13/2019 Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life

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How Will you Measure Your Life

Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, & Karen Dillon

Chapter One: Just Because you Have Feathers

The Difference between what to think and how to think

There are no easy answers to lifes challenges. P. 10 A bevy of so-called experts simply offer the answers. Its not a surprise

that these answers are very appealing to some. They take hard problems

ones that people can go through an entire life without ever resolvingand

offer a quick fix. There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of

life But I can offer you tools that Ill call theoriesin this book, which will

help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life. P.

10

A good theory doesnt change its mind; it doesnt apply only to somecompanies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what

causes what, and why. P. 12

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting asmuch data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car

looking only at the rearview mirrorbecause data is only available about the

past. P. 14

But so much of whats become popular thinking isnt grounded in anythingmore than a series of anecdotes. Solving the challenges in your life requires

a deep understanding of what causes what to happen.

With most complex problems its rarely as simple as identifying the one andonly theory that helps solve the problem. There can be multiple theories

that provide insight. P. 16

Chapter 2: Finding happiness in your Career

I want you to be able to experience that feelingto wake up every morningthinking how lucky you are to be doing what youre doing. P. 22

However, the problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs oftendo not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we dont notice

that gap until its too late. P. 23

What Makes us Tick

There is often a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what reallymotivates us. P. 25

Money is not a prime motivator. Some of the hardest-working people on theplanet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. P. 331

True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to doit. P. 32

Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one bigcontinuous spectrumstarting with very happy on one end and reaching all

the way down to absolutely miserable on the otheris not actually the way


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the mind works. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate,

independent measures. This means, for example, that its possible to love

your job and hate it at the same time. P. 32

The opposite ofjob dissatisfaction isntjob satisfaction, but rather anabsence of job dissatisfaction. P. 33

Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, andpersonal growth. P. 34

It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivatorsthe feelings ofaccomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is

achieving something meaningful. P. 38

If you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management isamong the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have

eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have

the opportunity to frame each persons work so that, at the end of every

day, your employees will go home feeling like[example in the book.] p. 39

The pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career.P. 39

The theory of motivation suggest you need to ask yourself a different set ofquestions than moist of us are used to asking, Is this work meaningful to me?

Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new

things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I

going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly

motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your

job will fade in importance. P. 41

Chapter Three: Balance of Calculation and Serendipity

Expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is justwasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected

opportunities. While you are still figuring out your career, you should keep

the aperture of your life wide open. P. 62

Chapter Four: Your Strategy is not what you say it is:

In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meetsthe road. Real strategyis created through hundreds of everyday decisions

about where we spend our resources. As youre living your life from day to

day, how doyou make sure youre heading in the right direction? Watch

where your resources flow. P. 62

In fact, if you study the root causes of business disasters [and personalones], over and over youll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer

immediate gratification over endeavors that result in long-term success. P.

68

Gloria Steinman said, We can tell our values by looking at our checkbookstubs. P. 73


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Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat,and tears are not consistent with the person aspire to be, youll never

become that person. P. 75

Section 11: Finding Happiness in your Relationships

Must balance a deliberate plan that delivers you your motivations alongside the

unexpected opportunities that will always arise along the way and allocate resourcesaccordingly along the way p. 79

Chapter 5: The Ticking Clock

Paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong

families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if its not

necessary [when you are young and building your career.] p. 84

One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential youngprofessionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced.

The logic is, for example, I can invest in my career during the early years

when our children are small and parenting isnt as critical.

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are oneof the greatest sources of happiness in life. These relationships need

constant attention and care. P. 98

Chapter 6: What Job did you Hire the Milkshake for

Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, ratherthan what those customers really need. Whats missing is empathy: a deep

understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve. The same is

true in our relationships; we go into them thinking about what w want rather

than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a

powerful way to deepen your relationships. P. 99

The insight behind this way of thinking is that what causes us to buy aproduct or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us. P. 101

In schools it is also important to understand this. The answer lies inunderstanding what jobs arise in the lives of students that schools might be

hired to solve. P. 110

The conclusion we reached was that going to school is not a job that childrenare trying to get done. It is something that a child might hire to do the job,

but it isnt thejob itself. The two fundamental jobs that children need to

do are to feel successful and to have friends. P. 11

Viewed from the perspective of jobs, it becomes very clear that schoolsdont often do these jobs well at allin fact, all too often, schools are

structured to help most students feel like failures. We had assumed going

in that those who succeed at school do so because they are motivated. But

we concluded that all students are similarly motivatedto succeed. The

problem is, only a fraction of students feel successful through school. p. 111


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There is no way that we can motivate children to work harder in class byconvincingthem that they shoulddo this. Rather, we need to offer children

experiences in school that help them do these jobsto feel successful and

do it with friends. P. 111

Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel successevery day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero.

Its so easy to mean well but get it wrong. P. 114 The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy,

someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. P. 115

Chapter 7: Sailing your kids on Theseuss Ship

The factors that determine what a company can and cannot doiscapabilitiesfall into one of three buckets: resources, processes, and

priorities. Capabilities are dynamic, and built over time; no company starts

out with its capabilities fully developed. P. 124

Resourcesusually people or thingsthey can be hired and fired, bought andsold, depreciated or built. Many resources are visible and often are

measurable. P. 125

Processes-ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate,and make decisions. These enable the resources to solve more and more

complicated problems. Ways that products are developed and made, and the

methods by which market research, budgeting, employee development,

compensation, and resource allocation are accomplished. Processes cant be

seen on a balance sheet. P. 125

If businesses have strong processes, the process will work regardless ofwho performs it.

Most significant are prioritiesclear guidance about what a company is likelyto invest in, and what it will not. Employees at every level will make

prioritization decisionswhat they will focus on today, and what theyll put

at the bottom of their list.

Never outsource the future. P. 126 As a general rule, in prosperous societies we have been outsourcing more and

more of the work that, a generation ago, was done internally in the home.

[Working together, home maintenance, etc. small jobs that teach a work

ethic and competency skills.

The end result of these good intentions is that too few reach adulthoodhaving been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and

solve complicated problems for themselves and for others. Self-esteem

comes from achieving something important hen its hard to do. We have

inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and

priorities it needs to succeed. P. 134

Children need to be challenged, to develop appropriate priorities. And if youfind yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all


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these experiencesoutsourcingyou are, in fact, losing valuable

opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you

respect and admire. Children will learn when theyre ready to learn, not

when youre ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter

challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to

shape their prioritiesand their lives. P. 139Chapter 7: The Schools of Experience

Employers constantly seek to hire the right person. By their own reckoningof managers, about a third were superb choices; 40 percent were adequate

choices; and about 25 percent turned out to be mistakes. In other words, a

typical manager gets it wrong a lot. P. 141

However, some experts feel that employees who have the right stuff hadhones [their skills] along the way, by having experiences that taught them

how to deal with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations.

In terms of the language of the capabilities from earlier, it is a search forprocess capabilities. [not innate resources]

Great leadersabilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life. Achallenging job, a failure in leading a project, an assignment in a new area of

the companyall these things become courses in the school of experience.

P. 144

Too often in looking at polished candidates, we biased our opinions towardthose with the right resources as opposed to looking at processes. P. 146

In aiming for the right stuff with your children. Encourage them tostretchto aim for lofty goals. If they dont succeed, make sure youre

there to help them learn the right lesson; that when you aim to achieve

great things, it is inevitable that sometimes youre not going to make it, =.

Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell

them that if theyre not occasionally failing, then theyre not aiming high

enough. P. 151

People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years ofnonstop achievement often fall apart. P. 155 We need to give opportunities

for challenges and chances to fail throughout life.

Chapter 9; The Invisible Hand inside your family

One of the most powerful tools to help us close the gap between the familywe want and the family we get is culture. We need to understand how it

works and be prepared to put in the hard yards to influence how it is shaped.

P. 158

Edgar Scheinthings dont define culture, they are artifacts of it. Cultureis a way of working toward common goals that have been followed so

frequently and so successfully that people dont even think about trying to

do things a different way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously

do what they need to do to be successful. P. 160


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Organizational culturea unique combination of processes and prioritieswithin an organization. P. 161

Organizations can shape culture by experiencing problems, solving them, anddealing with them again and again to shape the way we do it. P. 162

Chapter 10: Just this once

Christensen spent time in this chapter talking about being ethical and not doingsomething just this once if it is a shortcut, and possibly unethical. It is important

to maintain integrity at all times and always do the right thing. P. 178

Right now we are encouraging companies to spend money on things that havesucceeded in the past rather than guiding them to create capabilities they

will need in the future. P. 181

If we need the future would be exactly like the past, that would be okay butthe future is seldom the same as the future. [We do this in education,

continually training for the past, not rising for the future. Note mine]

Christensen talks about how small start-up companies are more likely to riskrather than big companies. [Education has a tendency to act like a big

company and not as risky as other ventures.]

Your personal moral line is powerful because you dont cross it; if you havejustified doing it once, theres nothing stopping you doing it again. P. 191

Epilogue

Christensen believes that for the words of his book to be meaningful, onemust have a purpose in life. A company must also have a purpose. The first

part of this purpose is what he calls a likenesswhat a manager and

employees hope they will have built when they reach a critical milestone in

their journey. P. 196

Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have adeep commitmentalmost a conversionto the likeness they are trying to

create. The purpose cant begin and end on paper.

The third part is one of a few metrics by which managers and employees canmeasure their progress.

Three partslikeness, commitment, and metricscomprise a companyspurpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their

purpose to chance. P. 196 The type of person you want to becomewhat the

purpose of your life isis too important to leave to chance. P. 197

The metric we use to measure how we are doing has to be able to see the bigpicture. We need to aggregate information in order to do so. P. 203

One of Christensens metrics I the individuals that I have been able to help,one by one, to become better people. P. 203

His final question is important, How will you measure your life? p. 206

christensen how will you measure your life

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