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Measuring Your Life

Posted by Michael under Leadership

Professor Clay Christensen was asked to address this year’s Harvard Business School graduands. They weren’t interested in exploring how to apply his principles to their careers, but to their whole lives and his speech revealed how he has applied the management theories and principles he’s developed over the years to his own life.

First he told the students that the important thing was to use the tools and that good management theory was in teaching people how to think, not what to think. In turning the tools of theory on themselves and reflecting on their own life, plans, ambitions and ethics, the students were encouraged to find what actions would lead to their desired results … and what careers would fulfil their wildest hopes.

Christensen offers three questions to elicit the right choices:

1. How can I be sure I’ll be happy in my career?
2. How can I be sure my relationships with family and spouse will be an enduring source of happiness?
3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

And he points out that while the last question may seem flippant, it’s not – two out of the 32 Rhodes scholars in his year have been to prison and one of the architects of the Enron scandal was a classmate of his at Harvard. As he puts it ‘These were good guys – but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction’.

So what is the overriding purpose of management? According to Christensen, it’s about building people, not businesses. A career in business isn’t about buying and selling but about building up the self esteem and abilities of others.

Strategy is often considered to be a primary process of management, but Christensen says that it’s all too common to see business leaders with broken homes – they didn’t set out with a strategy of becoming divorced and estranged from their families, but that’s how they ended up and it’s because they don’t focus on using strategy to drive their personal lives the way they did their business. He spent an hour a day thinking and praying about his own purpose in life and it had led him to a career and family life in balance.

He reminded students that strategy serves no purpose unless it has adequate resources – and that high achievers tend to invest their resources in what gives them immediate feedback. That can mean the response of hitting targets and meeting deadlines takes precedence over investing in family and outside interests, but in the long run, that leads to failure because if you invest less resources in the things that matter most, you starve them of value and vigour.

Then there’s the point of culture, and underutilised tool in the management kit. He says that while many businesses and relationships have to start with power to ensure cooperation: they must have rules and penalties to make employees do what is necessary, but as the business grows, the culture of following procedures and setting priorities develops into a culture which means that in family and business alike, treating people with integrity and confidence will build those qualities into the culture of your relationships.

In dealing with marginal costs, he told a personal story about extenuating circumstances. He had been in the Oxford University basketball team which made it to the finals of a UK contest. The finals were held on a Sunday and he had vowed never to play games on a Sunday, so he refused to play. His religion was more important to him than a game, even a final. His teammates were shocked and tried to get him to break the rule because it was such an important match. He refused. Today he believes that if he had once allowed ‘extenuating circumstances’ to encourage him to break the rule, by making one small decision in favour of expediency rather than deeply-held beliefs, he would have been constantly presented with other examples of why he should bend or break his rules and that could have led to ending up in a very bad place, like some of his former classmates.

He also pointed out that choosing the right measurement tools helped establish a good life – if your life is filled with decisions that help others, as well as you, the dividend will be a good life, but if your life is filled with decisions that help business, not others, and not necessarily you, you’ll end up with a good business, but not necessarily a good life!

Harvard Business School photograph courtesy of Patricia Drury

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