How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR, 2010)

Author: Clayton M. Christensen · Published: Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010 · URL: https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life (paywalled; full text from the 2011 Wayback capture of HBR’s print view)

One-line: Christensen’s talk to Harvard Business School’s class of 2010, as an article: point his management theories at your own life and answer three questions. How do I stay happy in my career? How do I make my family an enduring source of happiness? How do I stay out of jail?

Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. 2013–2015) as a fragment that breaks off mid-sentence: “activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces. My purpose”. The exact-phrase match is this article’s line, “Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces,” followed by “My purpose grew out of my religious faith…” The article later became the 2012 book How Will You Measure Your Life.

Summary

Teach how to think, not what to think. It opens with Andy Grove giving Christensen ten minutes to say what disruption meant for Intel. Christensen told the story of steel minimills (Nucor) moving up from rebar, and Grove reached Intel’s low-end Celeron strategy on his own. “Instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think.” Christensen’s HBS course follows that model, applying theory to one company per session. On the last day, students turn the theories on their own lives.

The three questions are about happiness in a career, family as an enduring source of happiness, and staying out of jail. He notes that two of the 32 people in his Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail, and that Jeff Skilling was an HBS classmate.

The theories applied:

• Career. Frederick Herzberg says the real motivator is “the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements,” not money. “Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well,” and “Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.”
• Create a strategy for your life. A company’s real strategy is whatever its resource-allocation process funds. His 1979 classmates showed up to reunions “unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children” because “they didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center.” As a Rhodes scholar he spent an hour every night “reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth,” time taken from applied econometrics. “It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. … Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.” He adds: “My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction.”
• Allocate your resources. High achievers put any spare half hour into whatever pays off visibly, which is usually career, so they “underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers.”
• Create a culture. Using the “Tools of Cooperation” model and Edgar Schein on how cultures form, parents should build a family culture early, before “power tools” stop working in the teen years.
• Avoid the “marginal costs” mistake. “Just this once” always looks cheap at the margin. He refused to play in the Oxford varsity basketball final on a Sunday. “It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.”
• Humility. It is “defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others.”
• Choose the right yardstick. After a cancer diagnosis: “the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.”

Full text

Archived privately against link rot: ../attachments/how-will-you-measure-your-life-hbr-2010/how-will-you-measure-your-life-hbr-2010.md, including HBR’s sidebar of Class of 2010 student quotes.

Connections

• How Will You Measure Your Life: the 2012 book (with James Allworth and Karen Dillon) that expands this article. Kyle has read it.
• Disruptive Innovation: Christensen names the framework in the saved line as one of the business tools that purpose “will trump.” The Grove story is also a compact telling of disruption theory (minimills moving up from rebar).
• Clayton Christensen: the author.
• Andy Grove and Intel: the opening anecdote.