How Will You Measure Your Life?
How Will You Measure Your Life?
by Clayton M. Christensen
Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of
2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation
ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a
tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and
their definition of success.
The students seem highly aware of how the world has
changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring,
Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen
to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their
post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their
personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him
find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep
religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we
asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more about
Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a
call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early
papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct
reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew
to Silicon Valley and showed up at the
appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only
10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I
said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model,
because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten
minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model.
Just tell us what it means for Intel.”
I insisted that I
needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its
way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could
understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel
minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing
bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the
traditional steel mills.
When I finished the
minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and
then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going
to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.
I’ve thought about
that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what
he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But
instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he
reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had
a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I
rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud
through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its
way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often
than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question
more insightfully than I could have.
My class at HBS is
structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and
how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that
help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in
stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company
through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got
into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed
results.
On the last day of
class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to
find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be
happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my
spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I
be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted,
it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail.
Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good
guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
“I came to business school knowing exactly what I wanted to do—and I’m
leaving choosing the exact opposite. I’ve worked in the private sector all my
life, because everyone always told me that’s where smart people are. But I’ve
decided to try government and see if I can find more meaning there.
“I used to think that industry was very safe. The recession has shown us
that nothing is safe.”
Ruhana Hafiz,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
Her Plans:To join the FBI as a special adviser (a
management track position)
“You could see a shift happening at HBS. Money used to be number one in the
job search. When you make a ton of money, you want more of it. Ironic thing.
You start to forget what the drivers of happiness are and what things are
really important. A lot of people on campus see money differently now. They
think, ‘What’s the minimum I need to have, and what else drives my life?’
instead of ‘What’s the place where I can get the maximum of both?’”
Patrick Chun,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To join Bain Capital
“The financial crisis helped me realize that you have to do what you really
love in life. My current vision of success is based on the impact I can have,
the experiences I can gain, and the happiness I can find personally, much more
so than the pursuit of money or prestige. My main motivations are (1) to be
with my family and people I care about; (2) to do something fun, exciting, and
impactful; and (3) to pursue a long-term career in entrepreneurship, where I
can build companies that change the way the world works.”
Matt Salzberg,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To work for Bessemer Venture Partners
“Because I’m returning to McKinsey, it probably seems like not all that
much has changed for me. But while I was at HBS, I decided to do the dual
degree at the Kennedy School. With the elections in 2008 and the economy
looking shaky, it seemed more compelling for me to get a better understanding
of the public and nonprofit sectors. In a way, that drove my return to
McKinsey, where I’ll have the ability to explore private, public, and nonprofit
sectors.
“The recession has made us step back and take stock of how lucky we are.
The crisis to us is ‘Are we going to have a job by April?’ Crisis to a lot of
people is ‘Are we going to stay in our home?’”
John Coleman,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To return to McKinsey & Company
As the students
discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case
study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to
guide their life decisions.
One of the theories
that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness
in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful
motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in
responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.
I tell the students
about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before
becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work
one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her
driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated,
underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem
affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then
fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater
self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving
valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important
initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a
parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s
practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn
and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute
to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking
that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies.
That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from
building up people.
Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up
people.
I want students to
leave my classroom knowing that.
Create a Strategy
for Your Life
A theory that is
helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship
with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how
strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s
strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in.
If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what
emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’
decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that
offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange
investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve
watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and
more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their
children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the
deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become
estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that
strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and
center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling
that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from
the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I
tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply
on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to
reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on
a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clear
purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long
and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a
very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work
into my time at Oxford.
I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why
God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep,
because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics.
I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away
from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of
my life.
Had I instead spent
that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of
autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I
apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of
the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever
learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their
life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they
discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without
a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their
purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards,
core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.
My purpose grew out
of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people
direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was
to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children
who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His
purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.
The choice and
successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose.
But without a purpose, life can become hollow.
Allocate Your
Resources
Your decisions about
allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s
strategy.
I have a bunch of
“businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding
relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community,
succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly
the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and
energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices
can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended.
Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if
you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my
former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I
can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term
perspective.
When people who have
a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School
graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll
unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible
accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re
moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation,
close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In
contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and
children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids
misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can
put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.”
You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis,
it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel
have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and
overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with
their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the
root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this
predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look
at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering
pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would
have once said mattered most.
Create a Culture
There’s an important
model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that
being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to
see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the
company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not
see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in
that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed
cooperation is a critical managerial skill.
The theory arrays
these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the
organization agree on what they want from their participation in the
enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the
desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use
“power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many
companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must
play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If
employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and
over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process
as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even
think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace
priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by
explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in
compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which
members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the
priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management
tool.
In using this model
to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring
source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that
parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But
there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At
that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their
children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children
instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and
choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do.
Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your
kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard
problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have
to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very
early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are
hard and learning what works.
Avoid the “Marginal
Costs” Mistake
We’re taught in
finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should
ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs
and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course
that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to
succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll
need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the
past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost
always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.
This theory
addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of
integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost
doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice
in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t
do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s
OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems
alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path
ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails.
Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in
the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
I’d like to share a
story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once”
in my own life. I played on the Oxford
University varsity
basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated.
The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to
the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It
turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had
made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on
Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My
teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys
on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule
just this one time?”
I’m a deeply
religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very
clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the
championship game.
In many ways that
was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In
theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then
not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic
was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to
be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one
unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one
time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned
from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than
it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,”
based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done,
you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you
stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Remember the
Importance of Humility
I got this insight
when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College.
I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One
characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of
self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were.
We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or
attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows
naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from
someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone,
either.
It’s crucial to take
a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate
school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more
experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School
or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll
interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your
attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning
opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn
something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.
Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and
you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When
we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward
others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem.
They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.
Choose the Right
Yardstick
This past year I was
diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner
than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the
experience has given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty
clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that
have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve
confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that
impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my
life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.
I think that’s the
way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual
prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped
become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric
by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so
that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
