How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

But I can offer you tools that I’ll call theories in this book, which will help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life.

But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think.

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.

That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in “if-then” statements.

At a basic level, a strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there. In the business world, this is the result of multiple influences: what a company’s priorities are, how a company responds to opportunities and threats along the way, and how a company allocates its precious resources. These things all continuously combine, to create and evolve a strategy.

The starting point for our journey is a discussion of priorities. These are, in effect, your core decision-making criteria: what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we don’t notice that gap until it’s too late.

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.

The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain.

But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.

Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the other—is not actually the way the mind works. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.

Let me explain. This theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors.

On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, w...

that compensation is a hygiene factor,

The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.

Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.

hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.

The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most 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.

Triumph. They strategized that by making motorcycles comparable to those made by these competitors, and selling them at significantly lower prices (at the time, Japanese labor was very inexpensive), they ought to be able to steal away 10 percent of the motorcycle import market from the Europeans.

No one had imagined that was how Honda’s entry in the U.S. market would play out. They had only planned to compete with the likes of Harley. But it was clear that a better opportunity had emerged.

The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees. The company has to decide whether to stick with the original plan, modify it, or even replace it altogether with one of the alternatives that arises.

The decision sometimes is an explicit decision; often, however, a modified strategy coalesces from myriad day-to-day decisions to pursue unanticipated opportunities and resolve unanticipated problems. When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy.

He also recognized that having his second store near his first would allow him to share shipments and deliveries more easily, and take advantage of other logistical efficiencies. That, ultimately, taught Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers.

But having such a focused plan really only makes sense in certain circumstances.

If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear, and you know from your present experience that they are worth striving for. Rather than worrying about adjusting to unexpected opportunities, your frame of mind should be focused on how best to achieve the goals you have deliberately set.

But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent. This is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.

Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

I was crushed, but an internship at a consulting firm emerged.

Oh no, a high paying job fell in my lap.

Journal. Another consulting firm then offered to pay the full cost of my second MBA year if I would take a postgraduation job with them. We were so broke that I decided to accept it—thinking that I could keep learning about business, and then break loose to start my career with the Journal.

Honestly what the fuck?

Unfortunately for my deliberate plan to be the Journal’s editor, I loved the consulting work I was doing.

Oops I like the job where I'm being paid a lot.

a friend of mine knocked on my door and asked me to start a company with him.

There's a much better story here than what's being told. Also, he starts as CEO? And is the guy just rich?

academia? I talked to an additional couple of professors about this, and on the Sunday evening of the very week I had lost my job, one of them called and asked if I would come in the next day. He announced that although the academic year had already started, they had gone out on a limb for me and made the highly unusual decision to admit me to their PhD program then and there. Less than a week after I had been fired, at age thirty-seven, I was a student once more.

Who gets this many opportunities?

“What has to prove true for this to work?”

As simple as it sounds, companies seldom think about whether to pursue new opportunities by asking this question. Instead, they often unintentionally stack the deck for failure from the beginning. They make decisions to go ahead with an investment based on what initial projections suggest will happen, but then they never actually test whether those initial projections are accurate. So, they can find themselves far down the line, adjusting projections and assumptions to fit what is actually happening, rather than making and testing thoughtful choices before they get too far in.

Instead, ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain.

Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control?

Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating.

Depending on your particular circumstances, you should be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators. Only then does a deliberate strategy make sense. When you get it right, you’ll know.

Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources.

The problem was, the salespeople were all on commission, and success for them was defined by the total value of their sales and gross margin dollars. It was much easier for Goodwin’s best salesman to sell one of the laptop-size ultrasound machines than it was to sell five of the little products. In other words, Goodwin thought that he was giving clear instructions into the salesman’s ear. But the compensation system was shouting the opposite instructions into his other ear.

The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers, as this domain of their life provides the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward.

Investing time and energy in these relationships doesn’t offer them that same immediate sense of achievement that a fast-track career does. You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating.

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

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong.

When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit.

A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.

The first step is that because the probability is so high that the initial plan isn’t viable, the investor needs to invest in the next wave of growth even while the original business is strong and growing—to give the new initiative the time to figure out a viable strategy.

In the next step, tomorrow arrives. The original core business has become mature and stops growing. The owner of the capital suddenly realizes that he should have invested several years earlier in the next growth business, so that when the core business stalled, the next engine of growth and profit would already be taking over as the engine for growth and profit. Instead, the engine just isn’t there.

Third, the owner of the capital demands that any business that he invests in must become very big, very fast.