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.
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.
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.
Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane
Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business
School.
