How Will you Measure Your Life Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, & Karen Dillon Chapter One:

Just Because you Have Feathers The Difference between what to think and how to think There are no easy answers to lifes challenges. P. 10 A bevy of so-called experts simply offer the answers. Its not a surprise that these answers are very appealing to some. They take hard problems ones that people can go through an entire life without ever resolvingand offer a quick fix. There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life But I can offer you tools that Ill call theories in this book, which will help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life. P. 10 A good theory doesnt change its mind; it doesnt apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why. P. 12 People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirrorbecause data is only available about the past. P. 14 But so much of whats become popular thinking isnt grounded in anything more than a series of anecdotes. Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen. With most complex problems its rarely as simple as identifying the one and only theory that helps solve the problem. There can be multiple theories that provide insight. P. 16 Chapter 2: Finding happiness in your Career I want you to be able to experience that feelingto wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what youre doing. P. 22 However, the problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often do not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we dont notice that gap until its too late. P. 23 What Makes us Tick There is often a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us. P. 25 Money is not a prime motivator. Some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. P. 331 True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. P. 32 Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrumstarting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the otheris not actually the way

the mind works. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that its possible to love your job and hate it at the same time. P. 32 The opposite of job dissatisfaction isnt job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. P. 33 Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. P. 34 It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivatorsthe feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. P. 38 If you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each persons work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like[example in the book.] p. 39 The pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career. P. 39 The theory of motivation suggest you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than moist of us are used to asking, Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance. P. 41 Chapter Three: Balance of Calculation and Serendipity 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. P. 62 Chapter Four: Your Strategy is not what you say it is: In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategyis created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. As youre living your life from day to day, how do you make sure youre heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. P. 62 In fact, if you study the root causes of business disasters [and personal ones], over and over youll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification over endeavors that result in long-term success. P. 68 Gloria Steinman said, We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. P. 73

Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person aspire to be, youll never become that person. P. 75 Section 11: Finding Happiness in your Relationships Must balance a deliberate plan that delivers you your motivations alongside the unexpected opportunities that will always arise along the way and allocate resources accordingly along the way p. 79 Chapter 5: The Ticking Clock Paradoxically, that the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if its not necessary [when you are young and building your career.] p. 84 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 logic is, for example, I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isnt as critical. I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. These relationships need constant attention and care. P. 98 Chapter 6: What Job did you Hire the Milkshake for Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. Whats 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 w want rather than what is important to the other person. Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships. P. 99 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. P. 101 In schools it is also important to understand this. The answer lies in understanding what jobs arise in the lives of students that schools might be hired to solve. P. 110 The conclusion we reached was that going to school is not a job that children are trying to get done. It is something that a child might hire to do the job, but it isnt the job itself. The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends. P. 11 Viewed from the perspective of jobs, it becomes very clear that schools dont often do these jobs well at allin fact, all too often, schools are structured to help most students feel like failures. We had assumed going in that those who succeed at school do so because they are motivated. But we concluded that all students are similarly motivatedto succeed. The problem is, only a fraction of students feel successful through school. p. 111

There is no way that we can motivate children to work harder in class by convincing them that they should do this. Rather, we need to offer children experiences in school that help them do these jobsto feel successful and do it with friends. P. 111 Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel success every day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero. Its so easy to mean well but get it wrong. P. 114 The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to. P. 115 Chapter 7: Sailing your kids on Theseuss Ship The factors that determine what a company can and cannot dois capabilitiesfall 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. P. 124 Resourcesusually people or thingsthey can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built. Many resources are visible and often are measurable. P. 125 Processes-ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate, and make decisions. These enable the resources to solve more and more complicated problems. Ways that products are developed and made, and the methods by which market research, budgeting, employee development, compensation, and resource allocation are accomplished. Processes cant be seen on a balance sheet. P. 125 If businesses have strong processes, the process will work regardless of who performs it. Most significant are prioritiesclear guidance about what a company is likely to invest in, and what it will not. Employees at every level will make prioritization decisionswhat they will focus on today, and what theyll put at the bottom of their list. Never outsource the future. P. 126 As a general rule, in prosperous societies we have been outsourcing more and more of the work that, a generation ago, was done internally in the home. [Working together, home maintenance, etc. small jobs that teach a work ethic and competency skills. The end result of these good intentions is that too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others. Self-esteem comes from achieving something important hen its hard to do. We have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed. P. 134 Children need to be challenged, to develop appropriate priorities. And if you find yourself handing your children over to other people to give them all

these experiencesoutsourcingyou are, in fact, losing valuable opportunities to help nurture and develop them into the kind of adults you respect and admire. Children will learn when theyre ready to learn, not when youre ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their prioritiesand their lives. P. 139 Chapter 7: The Schools of Experience Employers constantly seek to hire the right person. By their own reckoning of managers, about a third were superb choices; 40 percent were adequate choices; and about 25 percent turned out to be mistakes. In other words, a typical manager gets it wrong a lot. P. 141 However, some experts feel that employees who have the right stuff had hones [their skills] along the way, by having experiences that taught them how to deal with setbacks or extreme stress in high-stakes situations. In terms of the language of the capabilities from earlier, it is a search for process capabilities. [not innate resources] Great leadersabilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life. A challenging job, a failure in leading a project, an assignment in a new area of the companyall these things become courses in the school of experience. P. 144 Too often in looking at polished candidates, we biased our opinions toward those with the right resources as opposed to looking at processes. P. 146 In aiming for the right stuff with your children. Encourage them to stretchto aim for lofty goals. If they dont succeed, make sure youre there to help them learn the right lesson; that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes youre not going to make it, =. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if theyre not occasionally failing, then theyre not aiming high enough. P. 151 People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart. P. 155 We need to give opportunities for challenges and chances to fail throughout life. Chapter 9; The Invisible Hand inside your family One of the most powerful tools to help us close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. We need to understand how it works and be prepared to put in the hard yards to influence how it is shaped. P. 158 Edgar Scheinthings dont define culture, they are artifacts of it. Culture is a way of working toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people dont even think about trying to do things a different way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. P. 160

Organizational culturea unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization. P. 161 Organizations can shape culture by experiencing problems, solving them, and dealing with them again and again to shape the way we do it. P. 162 Chapter 10: Just this once Christensen spent time in this chapter talking about being ethical and not doing something just this once if it is a shortcut, and possibly unethical. It is important to maintain integrity at all times and always do the right thing. P. 178 Right now we are encouraging companies to spend money on things that have succeeded in the past rather than guiding them to create capabilities they will need in the future. P. 181 If we need the future would be exactly like the past, that would be okay but the future is seldom the same as the future. [We do this in education, continually training for the past, not rising for the future. Note mine] Christensen talks about how small start-up companies are more likely to risk rather than big companies. [Education has a tendency to act like a big company and not as risky as other ventures.] Your personal moral line is powerful because you dont cross it; if you have justified doing it once, theres nothing stopping you doing it again. P. 191 Epilogue Christensen believes that for the words of his book to be meaningful, one must have a purpose in life. A company must also have a purpose. The first part of this purpose is what he calls a likenesswhat a manager and employees hope they will have built when they reach a critical milestone in their journey. P. 196 Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitmentalmost a conversionto the likeness they are trying to create. The purpose cant begin and end on paper. The third part is one of a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress. Three partslikeness, commitment, and metricscomprise a companys purpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. P. 196 The type of person you want to becomewhat the purpose of your life isis too important to leave to chance. P. 197 The metric we use to measure how we are doing has to be able to see the big picture. We need to aggregate information in order to do so. P. 203 One of Christensens metrics I the individuals that I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. P. 203 His final question is important, How will you measure your life? p. 206