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Yet something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed.
By doing this, the students learn that a robust theory is able to explain what has and what will occur across the hierarchy of business: in industries; in the corporations within those industries; in the business units within those corporations; and in the teams that are within the business units.
I participate in these discussions with more history than my students do, but I follow the same rules. We are there to explore not what we hope will happen to us but rather what the theories predict will happen to us, as a result of different decisions and actions.
by starting with rebar at the bottom,
We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them.
And how we allocate our resources—our time, talent, and energies—is how we determine the actual strategy of our lives.
But often what we actually end up doing is very different from what we set out to do.
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. To help you avoid this mistake, I want to discuss the best research we have on what truly motivates people.
How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? 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.
One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory 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.
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.
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.
“This is just for a couple of years. I’ll pay off my loans, get myself in a good financial position, then I’ll go chase my real dreams.”
But somehow that early pledge to return to their real passion after a couple of years kept getting deferred. “Just one more year …” or “I’m not sure what else I would do now.” All the while, their incomes continued to swell.
They’d managed to expand their lifestyle to fit the salaries they were bringing in, and it was really difficult to wind that back. They’d made choices early on because of the hygiene factors, not true motivators, and they couldn’t find their way out of that trap.
The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.
it’s just that in these professions, money acts as a highly accurate yardstick of success. Traders, for example, feel success and are motivated by being able to predict what is going to happen in the world and then making bets based on those predictions. Being right is almost directly correlated with making money; it is the confirmation that they are doing their jobs well, the measure they use to compete on.
If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.
It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.
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.
The first source is anticipated opportunities—the opportunities that you can see and choose to pursue.
The second source of options is unanticipated
When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy. But it doesn’t stop there. The process of strategy then reiterates through these steps over and over again, constantly evolving. In other words, strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something decided, say, in a meeting of top managers based on the best numbers and analysis available at the time. Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process.
This wasn’t how he imagined his business in the beginning. His strategy emerged.
As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine; you will, hopefully, find a field where you can maximize the motivators and satisfy the hygiene factors.
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.
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.
In almost every case of a project failing, mistakes were made in one or more of the critical assumptions upon which the projections and decisions were based.
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. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing?
Instead, it hinges on continuing to experiment until you do find an approach that works. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success.
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.
But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road.
do I spend another half hour at work to get something extra done, or do I go home and play with my children?
many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course, as was true for so many of my classmates.
They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children.
Intending to build a satisfying personal life alongside their professional life, making choices specifically to provide a better life for their family, they unwittingly overlook their spouse and children. Investing time and energy in these relationships doesn’t offer them that same immediate sense of achievement that a fast-track career does.
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.
because the original plan proved not to be viable. In other words, successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong.
Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead.
A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one. Motorola learned this lesson with Iridium.
That is why capital that seeks growth before profit...
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If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn’t intuitively map in customers’ minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.
Interactions like those between Scott and Barbara occur thousands of times every day in households around the world. We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants. Scott probably wished he had helping hands to get through his tough day at work, so that’s what he offered Barbara when he got home.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Managers can’t be there to watch over every decision as a company gets bigger. That’s why the larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to ensure employees make, by themselves, prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. It means that successful senior executives need to spend a lot of time articulating clear, consistent priorities that are broadly understood throughout the organization.
