How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

by Clayton M. Christensen

Once you understand the concept of emergent and deliberate strategy, you’ll know that if you’ve yet to find something that really works in your career, expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities. While you are still figuring out your career, you should keep the aperture of your life wide open. 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.

Deliberate and emergent strategy

A strategy—whether in companies or in life—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.

Strategy and resource allocation

It’s natural to want the people you love to be happy. What can often be difficult is understanding what your role is in that. 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. 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. When you approach your relationships from this perspective, the answers will become much more clear than they would by simply speculating about what might be the right thing to do.

What neds to be done perspective

Wall Street analysts hawkishly monitor financial metrics and ratios that track the “efficiency” of capital used in a business. One particularly common one is RONA, or Return on Net Assets. In manufacturing businesses, this is calculated by dividing a company’s income by its net assets.

Return of net assets

Hence, a company can be judged as being more profitable either by adding income to the numerator, or by reducing the assets in the denominator. Driving the numerator up is harder, because it entails selling more products. Driving the denominator down is often easier—because you can just opt to outsource. The higher the ratio, the more efficient a business is judged to be in using its capital. Asus’s proposal made sense. If Dell could outsource some of its assets but still be able to sell its customers the same products, then it would improve its RONA, making Wall Street happy.

Return of net assets 2

Capabilities are dynamic and built over time; no company starts out with its capabilities fully developed. The most tangible of the three factors is resources, which include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built.

Organizations create value as employees transform resources into products and services of greater worth. The ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate, and make decisions are known as processes. These enable the resources to solve more and more complicated problems. Processes include the ways that products are developed and made, and the methods by which market research, budgeting, employee development, compensation, and resource allocation are accomplished. Unlike resources, which are often easily seen and measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet.

The third—and perhaps most significant—capability is an organization’s priorities. This set of factors defines how a company makes decisions; it can give clear guidance about what a company is likely to invest in, and what it will not. Employees at every level will make prioritization decisions—what they will focus on today, and what they’ll put at the bottom of their list.

Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all these experiences—outsourcing—you are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire.

Schein’s articulation of how culture is created allows executives to create a culture for their organization—provided that they follow the rules. It starts with defining a problem—one that recurs again and again. Next, they must ask a group to figure out how to solve that problem. If they fail, ask them to find a better way to solve it. Once they’ve succeeded, however, the managers need to ask the same team to solve the problem every time it recurs—over and over again. The more often they solve the problem successfully, the more instinctive it becomes to do it in the way that they designed. Culture in any organization is formed

Culture in organizations

The culture we picked is the right culture for our family, but every family should choose a culture that’s right for them. What is important is to actively choose what matters to you, and then engineer the culture to reinforce those elements, as Schein’s theory shows. It entails choosing what activities we pursue, and what outcomes we need to achieve, so that as a family, when we have to perform those activities again, we all think: “This is how we do it.” In our case, for example, we knew we couldn’t simply order our children to love work. Instead, we always tried to find ways for the kids to work together with us, and to make it fun.

Culture in families

All parents aspire to raise the kind of children that they know will make the right choices—even when they themselves are not there to supervise. One of the most effective ways to do that is to build the right family culture. It becomes the informal but powerful set of guidelines about how your family behaves. As people work together to solve challenges repeatedly, norms begin to form. The same is true in your family: when you first run up against a problem or need to get something done together, you’ll need to find a solution. It’s not just about controlling bad behavior; it’s about celebrating the good. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility?

Family culture

The Three Parts of Purpose

I genuinely believe that management is among the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers more ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.

Management as profession

Somehow, after all of this, I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.

The most importamt metrics in life