How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

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

That is why capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital.

But the reason why both types of capital appear in the name of the theory is that once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit.

Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends o...

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.

Deal with tomorrow tomorrow.

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

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.

The alternative to this approach is to focus on the opposite: invest to see a business grow big quickly and figure out how to be profitable down the line.

If a company has ignored investing in new businesses until it needs those new sources of revenue and profits, it’s already too late.

It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.

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

The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older.

Language dancing involves talking to the child about “what if,” and “do you remember,” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”—questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening around him. And it has a profound effect long before a parent might actually expect a child to understand what is being asked.

What’s more, Risley and Hart’s research suggests that “language dancing” is the key to this cognitive advantage—not income, ethnicity, or parents’ education. “In other words,” summarized Risley and Hart, “some working-poor people talked a lot to their kids and their kids did really well.

A child who enters school with a strong vocabulary and strong cognitive abilities is likely to do well in school early on and continues to do well in the longer term.

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

But as you are getting your career off the ground, you will be tempted to do exactly that: assume you can defer investing in your personal relationships. You cannot. The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them.

But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention.

The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

Many products fail because companies develop them from the wrong perspective.

Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s 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 we want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is...

“the job to be done.”

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

If a company has developed a product or service to do the job well, we buy, or “hire” it, to do the job.

The mechanism that causes us to buy a product is “I have a job I need to get done, and this is going to help me do it.”

wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to ‘hire’ a milkshake?”

In fact, it is here that this theory yields the most insight, simply because one of the most important jobs you’ll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse.

But the selflessness is based on the partners giving each other things that they want to give, and which they have decided that their partner ought to want—as

It’s easy for any of us to make assumptions about what our spouse might want, rather than work hard to understand the job to be done in our spouse’s life.

We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants.

Our effort is misplaced—we are just making a chocolatier milkshake. 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 suspect that if we studied marriage from the job-to-be-done lens, we would find that the husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.

the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

Neither Annie nor I feel this intense attachment to the people of those countries or to our church because our work there was easy—it’s the opposite. We feel this way because we gave so much of ourselves.

Thinking about your relationships from the perspective of the job to be done is the best way to understand what’s important to the people who mean the most to you. It allows you to develop true empathy.

In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.

All along, the numbers had looked good to Dell. But what the numbers had not shown was the impact these decisions would have on Dell’s future.

Dell started out as one of the most exciting computer companies around, but over the years, it has slowly outsourced its way to mediocrity in the consumer business.

You can tell from this story that there’s a danger to outsourcing.

When you boil it down, the factors that determine what a company can and cannot do—its capabilities—fall 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.

Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built.

Many resources are visible and often are measurable, so managers can readily assess their value.

Most people might think that resources are what make a business successful. But resources are only one of three cri...

Never Outsource the Future

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 futu...