How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

But all too often, this abundant capital gives fuel to the entrepreneurs, allowing them to recklessly pursue the wrong strategy aggressively.

Ironically, Honda succeeded because the company was so financially constrained in its early days, it was forced to be patient for growth while it figured out its profit model.

We like proving what we can do under pressure. Our projects, our clients, and our colleagues challenge us. We invest ourselves in our jobs. But in order to accomplish all this, we start to think of our jobs as requiring all our attention—and that’s exactly what we give them.

The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends—every day.

This may be the single hardest thing to get right in a marriage. Even with good intentions and deep love, we can fundamentally misunderstand each other. We get caught up in the day-to-day chores of our lives. Our communication ends up focusing only on who is doing what. We assume things.

I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

Given that sacrifice deepens our commitment, it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment, as the church was for me and Annie.

Asking yourself “What job does my spouse most need me to do?” gives you the ability to think about it in the right unit of analysis.

The theory of capabilities gives companies the framework to determine when outsourcing makes sense, and when it does not. There are two important considerations. First, you must take a dynamic view of your suppliers’ capabilities. Assume that they can and will change. You should not focus on what the suppliers are doing now, but, rather, focus on what they are striving to be able to do in the future. Second, and most critical of all: figure out what capabilities you will need to succeed in the future. These must stay in-house—otherwise, you are handing over the future of your business.

The Resources, Processes, and Priorities model of capabilities can help us gauge what our children will need to be able to do, given the types of challenges and problems that we know they will confront in their future.

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

When we so heavily focus on providing our children with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences?

There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.

In terms of the language of the capabilities from earlier, it is a search for process capabilities.

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization.

Almost always, such analysis shows that the marginal costs are lower, and marginal profits are higher, than the full cost. 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.

it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.

The reason, I think, is that we took time in the class to discuss how critical it is to articulate the purpose of our lives.

A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts.

A likeness of a company is what the key leaders and employees want the enterprise to have become at the end of the path that they are on.

Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitment—almost a conversion—to the likeness that they are trying to create.

The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress.