How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon Flashcards

1
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Despite such professional accomplishments, however, many of them were clearly unhappy.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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2
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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.

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3
Q

Then I write three simple questions beside those theories: How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career? My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness? I live a life of integrity—and stay out of jail?

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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4
Q

The Difference Between What to Think and How to Think

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5
Q

But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.

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6
Q

When people ask me something, I now rarely answer directly. Instead, I run the question through a theory in my own mind, so I know what the theory says is likely to be the result of one course of action, compared to another.

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7
Q

A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.

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8
Q

Good theory can help us categorize, explain, and, most important, predict.

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9
Q

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 mirror—because data is only available about the past.

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10
Q

This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

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11
Q

That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in “if-then” statements.

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12
Q

You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant.

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13
Q

You should learn all that you can from the past; from scholars who have studied it, and from people who have gone through problems of the sort that you are likely to face. But this doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into the future.

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14
Q

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs

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15
Q

The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy.

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16
Q

Drawing on our research, I will explain what the best circumstances are to be deliberate, to have that plan; and when it’s best to be emergent—to be open to the unexpected.

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17
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a problem known as agency theory, or incentive theory: why don’t managers always behave in a way that is in the best interest of shareholders? The root cause, as Jensen and Meckling saw it, is that people work in accordance with how you pay them. The takeaway was that you have to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders.

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18
Q

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.

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19
Q

a second school of thought—often called two-factor theory, or motivation theory—that turns the incentive theory on its head. It acknowledges that you can pay people to want what you want—over and over again. 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.

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20
Q

Frederick Herzberg, probably one of the most incisive writers on the topic of motivation theory,

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21
Q

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.

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22
Q

On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.

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23
Q

Herzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator.

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24
Q

Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.

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25
Q

if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.

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26
Q

the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.

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27
Q

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.

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28
Q

Many of my peers had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these.

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29
Q

they found themselves stuck. 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.

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30
Q

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.

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31
Q

But after it was finished, I rarely saw the children in it. The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.

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32
Q

There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.

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33
Q

For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy. Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. They are, after all, what our friends and family see as signs that we have “made it” professionally. But as soon as you find yourself focusing on the tangible aspects of your job, you are at risk of becoming like some of my classmates, chasing a mirage. The next pay raise, you think, will be the one that finally makes you happy. It’s a hopeless quest. The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most 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.

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34
Q

You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities.

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35
Q

options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the opportunities that you can see and choose to pursue.

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36
Q

When you put in place a plan focused on these anticipated opportunities, you are pursuing a deliberate strategy. The second source of options is unanticipated—usually a cocktail of problems and opportunities that emerges while you are trying to implement the deliberate plan or strategy that you have decided upon.

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37
Q

The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees.

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38
Q

often, however, a modified strategy coalesces from myriad day-to-day decisions to pursue unanticipated opportunities and resolve unanticipated problems. When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy.

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39
Q

having such a focused plan really only makes sense in certain circumstances.

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40
Q

If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear, and you know from your present experience that they are worth striving for. Rather than worrying about adjusting to unexpected opportunities, your frame of mind should be focused on how best to achieve the goals you have deliberately set. But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent.

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41
Q

When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

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42
Q

Of course, it’s easy to say be open to opportunities as they emerge. It’s much harder to know which strategy you should actually pursue.

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43
Q

There’s a tool that can help you test whether your deliberate strategy or a new emergent one will be a fruitful approach. It forces you to articulate what assumptions need to be proved true in order for the strategy to succeed. The academics who created this process, Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, called it “discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?”

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44
Q

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.

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45
Q

It’s only then, once the team begins, that they learn which of those assumptions baked into the financial plan turned out to be right and which were flawed.

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46
Q

When a promising new idea emerges, financial projections should, of course, be made. But instead of pretending these are accurate, acknowledge that at this point, they are really rough.

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47
Q

ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain, while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain.

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48
Q

Only after you understand the relative importance of all the underlying assumptions should you green-light the team—but not in the way that most companies tend to do. Instead, find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.

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49
Q

Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Make sure you are being realistic about the path ahead of you.

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50
Q

What we can learn from how companies develop strategy is that although it is hard to get it right at first, success doesn’t rely on this. 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. 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.

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51
Q

the jobs that your spouse is trying to do are often very different from the jobs that you think she should want to do.

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52
Q

We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants.

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53
Q

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.

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54
Q

By working to truly understand the job she needs done, and doing it well, I can cause myself to fall more deeply in love with my spouse, and, I hope, her with me.

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55
Q

I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

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56
Q

This principle—that sacrifice deepens our commitment—doesn’t just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations.

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57
Q

Given that sacrifice deepens our commitment, it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment,

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58
Q

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. But you have to go beyond understanding what job your spouse needs you to do. You have to do that job. You’ll have to devote your time and energy to the effort, be willing to suppress your own priorities and desires, and focus on doing what is required to make the other person happy. Nor should we be timid in giving our children and our spouses the same opportunities to give of themselves to others. You might think this approach would actually cause resentment in relationships because one person is so clearly giving up something for the other. But I have found that it has the opposite effect. In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.

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59
Q

Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers. In this Greek-tragedy tale, Asus had taken everything it had learned from Dell and applied it for itself. It started at the simplest of activities in the value chain, then, decision by decision, every time that Dell outsourced the next lowest-value-adding of the remaining activities in its business, Asus added a higher value-adding activity to its business.

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60
Q

When you boil it down, the factors that determine what a company can and cannot do—its capabilities—fall into one of three buckets: resources, processes, and priorities.

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61
Q

tangible of the three factors is resources, which include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers.

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62
Q

Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built.

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63
Q

The ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate, and make decisions are known as processes.

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64
Q

Unlike resources, which are often easily seen and measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet.

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65
Q

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.

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66
Q

It means that successful senior executives need to spend a lot of time articulating clear, consistent priorities that are broadly understood throughout the organization.

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67
Q

The theory of capabilities gives companies the framework to determine when outsourcing makes sense, and when it does not.

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68
Q

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

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69
Q

There was so much work going on that children essentially worked for their parents. Step by step, over the past fifty years, it has become cheaper and easier to outsource this work to professionals. Now the only work being done in many of our homes is a periodic cleanup of the mess that we make.

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70
Q

too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others.

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71
Q

self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.

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72
Q

We have outsourced the work from our homes, and we’ve allowed the vacuum to be filled with activities that don’t challenge or engage our kids. By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.

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73
Q

some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me.

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74
Q

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

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75
Q

There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.

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76
Q

I guess the thing to learn from this is that children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”

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77
Q

first, when children are ready to learn, we need to be there. And second, we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.

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78
Q

if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they?

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79
Q

You have your children’s best interests at heart when you provide them with resources. It’s what most parents think they’re supposed to do—provide for their child.

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80
Q

But too much of this loving gesture can actually undermine their becoming the adults you want them to be. 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. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re 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 priorities—and their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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81
Q

Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. It will be critical to equipping them for all the challenges that life will throw at them down the line.

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82
Q

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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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83
Q

Morgan McCall, a professor at the University of Southern California, in a book called High Flyers,

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84
Q

thinking is not based on the idea that great leaders are born ready to go. Rather, their abilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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85
Q

One of the CEOs I have most admired, Nolan Archibald,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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86
Q

he asked himself: “What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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87
Q

learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough. Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child striving for an out-of-reach goal.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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88
Q

He’ll think, My parents will be there to solve hard problems for me. I won’t have to figure it out on my own.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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89
Q

Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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90
Q

But that child will likely not feel good about what he allowed to happen, which is the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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91
Q

Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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92
Q

You should consciously think about what abilities you want your child to develop, and then what experiences will likely help him get them.

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93
Q

The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life.

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94
Q

The challenges your children face serve an important purpose: they will help them hone and develop the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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95
Q

people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they’ve taken the wrong “courses.”

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96
Q

The natural tendency of many parents is to focus entirely on building your child’s résumé: good grades, sports successes, and so on. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect the courses your children need to equip them for the future. Once you have that figured out, work backward: find the right experiences to help them build the skills they’ll need to succeed. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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97
Q

All we can do is hope that somehow we’ve raised them well enough that they come to the right conclusion by themselves.

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98
Q

Their priorities need to be set correctly so they will know how to evaluate their options and make a good choice. The best tool we have to help our children do this is through the culture we build in our families.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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99
Q

Schein defined culture, and how it is formed, in these terms: Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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100
Q

Every time they tackle a problem, employees aren’t just solving the problem itself; in solving it, they are learning what matters.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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101
Q

You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. 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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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102
Q

Often even more perplexing, however, is when these problems arise within the mind of the same person: when the right decision for the long term makes no sense for the short term;

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103
Q

resource allocation is where the rubber meets the road. The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources. Everything related to strategy inside a company is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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104
Q

when the measures of success for employees are counter to those that will make the company successful.

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105
Q

brought Apple back to its roots: to make the best products in the world, change the way people think about using technology in their lives, and provide a fantastic user experience. Anything not aligned with that got scrapped;

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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106
Q

if you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find a predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification over endeavors that result in long-term success. Many companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, so companies often favor these and shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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107
Q

Unilever (and many corporations like them) inadvertently teach their best employees to hit only bunts and singles.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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108
Q

Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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109
Q

Unless you manage it mindfully, your personal resource allocation process will decide investments for you according to the “default” criteria that essentially are wired into your brain and your heart.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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110
Q

In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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111
Q

lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process.

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112
Q

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. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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113
Q

Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process. If it is not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, you run the risk of a serious problem.

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114
Q

if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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115
Q

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family. —Thomas Jefferson

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116
Q

Many of us are wired with a high need for achievement, and your career is going to be the most immediate way to pursue that. In our own internal resource allocation process, it will be incredibly tempting to invest every extra hour of time or ounce of energy in whatever activity yields the clearest and most immediate evidence that we’ve achieved something. Our careers provide such evidence in spades.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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117
Q

In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home. Investing our time and energy in raising wonderful children or deepening our love with our spouse often doesn’t return clear evidence of success for many years. What this leads us to is over-investing in our careers, and under-investing in our families—starving one of the most important parts of our life of the resources it needs to flourish.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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118
Q

You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern. And you have to make sure that you’re thinking about all these in the right time frame—overcome the natural tendency to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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119
Q

I’ve had to force myself to stay aligned with what matters most to me by setting hard stops, barriers, and boundaries in my life—such as leaving the office at six every day so that there is daylight time to play catch with my son,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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120
Q

We rarely have children who are exactly like us—or like each other—something that often comes as a surprise to new parents.

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121
Q

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. They are worth fighting for.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

122
Q

you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships onto the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them. This means, almost 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 it’s not necessary.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

123
Q

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

124
Q

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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

125
Q

When the winning strategy is not yet clear in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

126
Q

That is why capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

127
Q

once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit. Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

128
Q

Ironically, Honda succeeded because the company was so financially constrained in its early days, it was forced to be patient for growth while it figured out its profit model.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

129
Q

invest to see a business grow big quickly and figure out how to be profitable down the line. This is what Motorola did with Iridium. History is littered with failed companies that tried to take this path; it’s almost always an ineffective shortcut to success.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

130
Q

If a company has ignored investing in new businesses until it needs those new sources of revenue and profits, it’s already too late.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

131
Q

wishes he’d prioritized differently—and invested in those relationships before he needed them to pay off for him.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

132
Q

Each of us can point to one or two friendships we’ve unintentionally neglected when life got busy. You might be hoping that the bonds of your friendship are strong enough to endure such neglect, but that’s seldom the case. Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else. If they do, the loss will be yours.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

133
Q

The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

134
Q

The researchers observed two different types of conversations between parents and infants. One type they dubbed “business language”—such as, “Time for a nap,” “Let’s go for a ride,” and “Finish your milk.” Such conversations were simple and direct, not rich and complex. Risley and Hart concluded that these types of conversations had limited effect on cognitive development. In contrast, when parents engaged in face-to-face conversation with the child—speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be part of a chatty, grown-up conversation—the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interactions they called “language dancing.” Language dancing is being chatty, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and what the parent is doing or planning to do.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

135
Q

A child who has heard 48 million words in the first three years won’t just have 3.7 times as many well-lubricated connections in its brain as a child who has heard only 13 million words. The effect on brain cells is exponential.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

136
Q

All the variation in outcomes was taken up by the amount of talking, in the family, to the babies before age three.”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

137
Q

It’s mind-boggling to think that such a tiny investment has the potential for such enormous returns. Yet many parents think they can start focusing on their child’s academic performance when they hit school. But by then, they’ve missed a huge window of opportunity to give their kid a leg up.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

138
Q

But as you are getting your career off the ground, you will be tempted to do exactly that: assume you can defer investing in your personal relationships. You cannot. The only way to have those relationships bear fruit in your life is to invest long before you need them.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

139
Q

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

140
Q

Many products fail because companies develop them from the wrong perspective. Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

141
Q

“the job to be done.” 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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

142
Q

The mechanism that causes us to buy a product is “I have a job I need to get done, and this is going to help me do it.”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

143
Q

When a company understands the jobs that arise in people’s lives, and then develops products and the accompanying experiences required in purchasing and using the product to do the job perfectly, it causes customers to instinctively “pull” the product into their lives whenever the job arises.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

144
Q

You have to start by understanding the job the customer is trying to have done.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

145
Q

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 isn’t the job itself. The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends—every day.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

146
Q

it becomes very clear that schools don’t often do these jobs well at all—in 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 motivated—to succeed. The problem is, only a fraction of students feel successful through school.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

147
Q

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 jobs—to feel successful and do it with friends.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

148
Q

Schools that have designed their curriculum so that students feel success every day see rates of dropping out and absenteeism fall to nearly zero.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

149
Q

What Job Are You Being Hired For?

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

150
Q

one of the most important jobs you’ll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse. Getting this right, I believe, is critical to sustaining a happy marriage.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

151
Q

they are creating an understanding of the priorities in the business, and how to execute them—the processes. A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization.

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152
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culture will coalesce and become an internal set of rules and guidelines that employees in the company will draw upon in making the choices ahead of them.

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153
Q

They will just assume that the way they have been doing it is the way of doing it. The advantage of this is that it effectively causes an organization to become self-managing.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

154
Q

Pixar has become in many ways a self-managing company, thanks to its culture. Management doesn’t need to dive into the details of every decision, because the culture—almost as an agent of management—is present in the details of every decision.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

155
Q

Culture in any organization is formed through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.

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156
Q

But management can’t just spend time communicating what the culture is—it must make decisions that are entirely in alignment with it.

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157
Q

If you don’t articulate a culture—or articulate one but don’t enforce it—then a culture is still going to emerge. However, it is going to be based on the processes and priorities that have been repeated within the organization and have worked.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

158
Q

You can tell the health of a company’s culture by asking, “When faced with a choice on how to do something, did employees make the decision that the culture ‘wanted’ them to make?

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159
Q

A culture can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently. If you want your family to have a culture with a clear set of priorities for everyone to follow, then those priorities need to be proactively designed into the culture—which

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

160
Q

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,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

161
Q

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it. Forming a culture is not an instant loop; it’s not something you can decide on, communicate, and then expect it to suddenly work on its own.

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162
Q

With good intentions, many exhausted parents find it too difficult to stay consistent with their rules early on—and inadvertently, they allow a culture of laziness or defiance to creep into their family.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

163
Q

You have to consciously work throughout the years your children are young to help them see “success” in the things you want to be part of your culture.

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164
Q

I am grateful that I have not allowed the kind of person that I wanted to become to be left to chance. That was a very deliberate decision.

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165
Q

If you are consistent, then even when they are playing at a friend’s house, that’s the behavior they will carry with them.

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166
Q

Left unchecked long enough, “once or twice” quickly becomes the culture. As these sets of behavior embed themselves in a family culture, they become very hard to change.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

167
Q

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.

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168
Q

This is what is so powerful about culture. It’s like an autopilot. What is critical to understand is that for it to be an effective force, you have to properly program the autopilot—you have to build the culture that you want in your family. If you do not consciously build it and reinforce it from the earliest stages of your family life, a culture will still form—but it will form in ways you may not like. Allowing your children to get away with lazy or disrespectful behavior a few times will begin the process of making it your family’s culture. So will telling them that you’re proud of them when they work hard to solve a problem. Although it’s difficult for a parent to always be consistent and remember to give your children positive feedback when they do something right, it’s in these everyday interactions that your culture is being set. And once that happens, it’s almost impossible to change.

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169
Q

“full versus marginal thinking” that will help you answer our final question: how can I be sure I live a life of integrity?

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170
Q

It comes with no warning signs. Instead, most of us will face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. But over time, they can play out far more dramatically. It happens exactly the same way in companies. No company deliberately sets out to let itself be overtaken by its competitors. Rather, they are seemingly innocuous decisions that were made years before that led them down that path. This chapter will explain how that process happens so you can avoid falling into the most beguiling trap of all.

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171
Q

Blockbuster followed a principle that is taught in every fundamental course in finance and economics: that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs (costs that have already been incurred), and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues (the new costs and revenues) that each alternative entails.

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172
Q

This doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future.

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173
Q

The right way to look at this new market was not to think, “How can we protect our existing business?” Instead, Blockbuster should have been thinking: “If we didn’t have an existing business, how could we best build a new one? What would be the best way for us to serve our customers?”

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174
Q

failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, we end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not.

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175
Q

the theory of marginal versus full costs. Every time an executive in an established company needs to make an investment decision, there are two alternatives on the menu. The first is the full cost of making something completely new. The second is to leverage what already exists, so that you only need to incur the marginal cost and revenue. Almost always, the marginal-cost argument overwhelms the full-cost.

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176
Q

When there is competition, and this theory causes established companies to continue to use what they already have in place, they pay far more than the full cost—because the company loses its competitiveness. As Henry Ford once put it, “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”

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177
Q

The marginal cost of doing something “just this once” always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher.

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178
Q

the price of doing something wrong “just this once” usually appears alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t see where that path is ultimately headed or the full cost that the choice entails.

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179
Q

The costs of taking the high road are always clear like that. But the costs of taking the low road—the one Leeson took—don’t seem that bad at the start.

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180
Q

100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

181
Q

The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to just use the marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.

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182
Q

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

183
Q

When a company is faced with making an investment in future innovation, it usually crunches the numbers to decide what to do from the perspective of its existing operations. Based on how those numbers play out, it may decide to forgo the investment if the marginal upside is not worth the marginal cost of undertaking the investment. But there’s a big mistake buried in that thinking. And that’s the trap of marginal thinking. You can see the immediate costs of investing, but it’s really hard to accurately see the costs of not investing. When you decide that the upside of investing in the new product isn’t substantial enough while you still have a perfectly acceptable existing product, you aren’t taking into account a future in which somebody else brings the new product to market. You’re assuming everything else—specifically, the money you make on the old product—will continue forever exactly as it has up until now. A company may not see any consequences of that decision for some time. It might not get “caught” in the short term if a competitor doesn’t get ahead. But the company that makes all its decisions through this marginal-costs lens will, eventually, pay the price. So often this is what causes successful companies to keep from investing in their future and, ultimately, to fail. The same is true of people, too. The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.

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184
Q

That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure. —Peter F. Drucker

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

185
Q

we took time in the class to discuss how critical it is to articulate the purpose of our lives.

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186
Q

if an organization has a clear and compelling purpose, its impact and legacy can be extraordinary.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

187
Q

A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is what I will call a likeness.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

188
Q

likeness is what the managers and employees hope they will have actually built when they reach each critical milestone in their journey.

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189
Q

Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitment—almost a conversion—to the likeness that they are trying to create.

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190
Q

The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress. These metrics enable everyone associated with the enterprise to calibrate their work, keeping them moving together in a coherent way.

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191
Q

Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued. When that is in place, however, then how the company gets there is typically emergent—

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

192
Q

The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

193
Q

I wasn’t too rigid in how I could achieve my purpose.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

194
Q

remember that this is a process, not an event. It took me years to fully understand my own purpose.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

195
Q

From these parts of my life, I distilled the likeness of what I wanted to become: A man who is dedicated to helping improve the lives of other people A kind, honest, forgiving, and selfless husband, father, and friend A man who just doesn’t just believe in God, but who believes God

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196
Q

Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?

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197
Q

For me, defining the likeness of the person I wanted to become was straightforward. However, being deeply committed to actually becoming this type of person was hard.

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198
Q

we need to aggregate to help us see the big picture. This is far from an accurate way to measure things, but this is the best that we can do.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

199
Q

I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life’s purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they will ever have discovered. I warn them that their time at school might be the best time to reflect deeply on that question. Fast-paced careers, family responsibilities, and tangible rewards of success tend to swallow up time and perspective.

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200
Q

In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

201
Q

the jobs that your spouse is trying to do are often very different from the jobs that you think she should want to do.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

202
Q

We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

203
Q

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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

204
Q

By working to truly understand the job she needs done, and doing it well, I can cause myself to fall more deeply in love with my spouse, and, I hope, her with me.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

205
Q

I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

206
Q

This principle—that sacrifice deepens our commitment—doesn’t just work in marriages. It applies to members of our family and close friends, as well as organizations and even cultures and nations.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

207
Q

Given that sacrifice deepens our commitment, it’s important to ensure that what we sacrifice for is worthy of that commitment,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

208
Q

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. But you have to go beyond understanding what job your spouse needs you to do. You have to do that job. You’ll have to devote your time and energy to the effort, be willing to suppress your own priorities and desires, and focus on doing what is required to make the other person happy. Nor should we be timid in giving our children and our spouses the same opportunities to give of themselves to others. You might think this approach would actually cause resentment in relationships because one person is so clearly giving up something for the other. But I have found that it has the opposite effect. In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

209
Q

Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers. In this Greek-tragedy tale, Asus had taken everything it had learned from Dell and applied it for itself. It started at the simplest of activities in the value chain, then, decision by decision, every time that Dell outsourced the next lowest-value-adding of the remaining activities in its business, Asus added a higher value-adding activity to its business.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

210
Q

When you boil it down, the factors that determine what a company can and cannot do—its capabilities—fall into one of three buckets: resources, processes, and priorities.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

211
Q

tangible of the three factors is resources, which include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

212
Q

Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

213
Q

The ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate, and make decisions are known as processes.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

214
Q

Unlike resources, which are often easily seen and measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

215
Q

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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

216
Q

It means that successful senior executives need to spend a lot of time articulating clear, consistent priorities that are broadly understood throughout the organization.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

217
Q

The theory of capabilities gives companies the framework to determine when outsourcing makes sense, and when it does not.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

218
Q

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

219
Q

There was so much work going on that children essentially worked for their parents. Step by step, over the past fifty years, it has become cheaper and easier to outsource this work to professionals. Now the only work being done in many of our homes is a periodic cleanup of the mess that we make.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

220
Q

too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

221
Q

self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

222
Q

We have outsourced the work from our homes, and we’ve allowed the vacuum to be filled with activities that don’t challenge or engage our kids. By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.

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223
Q

some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

224
Q

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

225
Q

There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

226
Q

I guess the thing to learn from this is that children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them.”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

227
Q

first, when children are ready to learn, we need to be there. And second, we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

228
Q

if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they?

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

229
Q

You have your children’s best interests at heart when you provide them with resources. It’s what most parents think they’re supposed to do—provide for their child.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

230
Q

But too much of this loving gesture can actually undermine their becoming the adults you want them to be. 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. Children will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when you’re 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 priorities—and their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

231
Q

Helping your children learn how to do difficult things is one of the most important roles of a parent. It will be critical to equipping them for all the challenges that life will throw at them down the line.

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232
Q

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.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

233
Q

Morgan McCall, a professor at the University of Southern California, in a book called High Flyers,

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234
Q

thinking is not based on the idea that great leaders are born ready to go. Rather, their abilities are developed and shaped by experiences in life.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

235
Q

One of the CEOs I have most admired, Nolan Archibald,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

236
Q

he asked himself: “What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”

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237
Q

learn the right lesson: that when you aim to achieve great things, it is inevitable that sometimes you’re not going to make it. Urge them to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. Tell them that if they’re not occasionally failing, then they’re not aiming high enough. Everyone knows how to celebrate success, but you should also celebrate failure if it’s as a result of a child striving for an out-of-reach goal.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

238
Q

He’ll think, My parents will be there to solve hard problems for me. I won’t have to figure it out on my own.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

239
Q

Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

240
Q

But that child will likely not feel good about what he allowed to happen, which is the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

241
Q

Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

242
Q

You should consciously think about what abilities you want your child to develop, and then what experiences will likely help him get them.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

243
Q

The important thing for a parent is, as always, to never give up; never stop trying to help your children get the right experiences to prepare them for life.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

244
Q

The challenges your children face serve an important purpose: they will help them hone and develop the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

245
Q

people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they’ve taken the wrong “courses.”

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246
Q

The natural tendency of many parents is to focus entirely on building your child’s résumé: good grades, sports successes, and so on. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect the courses your children need to equip them for the future. Once you have that figured out, work backward: find the right experiences to help them build the skills they’ll need to succeed. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

247
Q

All we can do is hope that somehow we’ve raised them well enough that they come to the right conclusion by themselves.

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248
Q

Their priorities need to be set correctly so they will know how to evaluate their options and make a good choice. The best tool we have to help our children do this is through the culture we build in our families.

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249
Q

Schein defined culture, and how it is formed, in these terms: Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

250
Q

Every time they tackle a problem, employees aren’t just solving the problem itself; in solving it, they are learning what matters.

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251
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they are creating an understanding of the priorities in the business, and how to execute them—the processes. A culture is the unique combination of processes and priorities within an organization.

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252
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culture will coalesce and become an internal set of rules and guidelines that employees in the company will draw upon in making the choices ahead of them.

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253
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They will just assume that the way they have been doing it is the way of doing it. The advantage of this is that it effectively causes an organization to become self-managing.

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254
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Pixar has become in many ways a self-managing company, thanks to its culture. Management doesn’t need to dive into the details of every decision, because the culture—almost as an agent of management—is present in the details of every decision.

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255
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Culture in any organization is formed through repetition. That way of doing things becomes the group’s culture.

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256
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But management can’t just spend time communicating what the culture is—it must make decisions that are entirely in alignment with it.

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257
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If you don’t articulate a culture—or articulate one but don’t enforce it—then a culture is still going to emerge. However, it is going to be based on the processes and priorities that have been repeated within the organization and have worked.

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258
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You can tell the health of a company’s culture by asking, “When faced with a choice on how to do something, did employees make the decision that the culture ‘wanted’ them to make?

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259
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A culture can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently. If you want your family to have a culture with a clear set of priorities for everyone to follow, then those priorities need to be proactively designed into the culture—which

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

260
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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,

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

261
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Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it. Forming a culture is not an instant loop; it’s not something you can decide on, communicate, and then expect it to suddenly work on its own.

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262
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With good intentions, many exhausted parents find it too difficult to stay consistent with their rules early on—and inadvertently, they allow a culture of laziness or defiance to creep into their family.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

263
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You have to consciously work throughout the years your children are young to help them see “success” in the things you want to be part of your culture.

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264
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I am grateful that I have not allowed the kind of person that I wanted to become to be left to chance. That was a very deliberate decision.

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265
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If you are consistent, then even when they are playing at a friend’s house, that’s the behavior they will carry with them.

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266
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Left unchecked long enough, “once or twice” quickly becomes the culture. As these sets of behavior embed themselves in a family culture, they become very hard to change.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

267
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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.

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268
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This is what is so powerful about culture. It’s like an autopilot. What is critical to understand is that for it to be an effective force, you have to properly program the autopilot—you have to build the culture that you want in your family. If you do not consciously build it and reinforce it from the earliest stages of your family life, a culture will still form—but it will form in ways you may not like. Allowing your children to get away with lazy or disrespectful behavior a few times will begin the process of making it your family’s culture. So will telling them that you’re proud of them when they work hard to solve a problem. Although it’s difficult for a parent to always be consistent and remember to give your children positive feedback when they do something right, it’s in these everyday interactions that your culture is being set. And once that happens, it’s almost impossible to change.

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269
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“full versus marginal thinking” that will help you answer our final question: how can I be sure I live a life of integrity?

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270
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It comes with no warning signs. Instead, most of us will face a series of small, everyday decisions that rarely seem like they have high stakes attached. But over time, they can play out far more dramatically. It happens exactly the same way in companies. No company deliberately sets out to let itself be overtaken by its competitors. Rather, they are seemingly innocuous decisions that were made years before that led them down that path. This chapter will explain how that process happens so you can avoid falling into the most beguiling trap of all.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

271
Q

Blockbuster followed a principle that is taught in every fundamental course in finance and economics: that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs (costs that have already been incurred), and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues (the new costs and revenues) that each alternative entails.

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272
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This doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future.

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273
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The right way to look at this new market was not to think, “How can we protect our existing business?” Instead, Blockbuster should have been thinking: “If we didn’t have an existing business, how could we best build a new one? What would be the best way for us to serve our customers?”

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failure is often at the end of a path of marginal thinking, we end up paying for the full cost of our decisions, not the marginal costs, whether we like it or not.

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275
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the theory of marginal versus full costs. Every time an executive in an established company needs to make an investment decision, there are two alternatives on the menu. The first is the full cost of making something completely new. The second is to leverage what already exists, so that you only need to incur the marginal cost and revenue. Almost always, the marginal-cost argument overwhelms the full-cost.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

276
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When there is competition, and this theory causes established companies to continue to use what they already have in place, they pay far more than the full cost—because the company loses its competitiveness. As Henry Ford once put it, “If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.”

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

277
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The marginal cost of doing something “just this once” always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

278
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the price of doing something wrong “just this once” usually appears alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t see where that path is ultimately headed or the full cost that the choice entails.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

279
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The costs of taking the high road are always clear like that. But the costs of taking the low road—the one Leeson took—don’t seem that bad at the start.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

280
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100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

281
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The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to just use the marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.

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282
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Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

283
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When a company is faced with making an investment in future innovation, it usually crunches the numbers to decide what to do from the perspective of its existing operations. Based on how those numbers play out, it may decide to forgo the investment if the marginal upside is not worth the marginal cost of undertaking the investment. But there’s a big mistake buried in that thinking. And that’s the trap of marginal thinking. You can see the immediate costs of investing, but it’s really hard to accurately see the costs of not investing. When you decide that the upside of investing in the new product isn’t substantial enough while you still have a perfectly acceptable existing product, you aren’t taking into account a future in which somebody else brings the new product to market. You’re assuming everything else—specifically, the money you make on the old product—will continue forever exactly as it has up until now. A company may not see any consequences of that decision for some time. It might not get “caught” in the short term if a competitor doesn’t get ahead. But the company that makes all its decisions through this marginal-costs lens will, eventually, pay the price. So often this is what causes successful companies to keep from investing in their future and, ultimately, to fail. The same is true of people, too. The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.

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284
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That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure. —Peter F. Drucker

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

285
Q

we took time in the class to discuss how critical it is to articulate the purpose of our lives.

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286
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if an organization has a clear and compelling purpose, its impact and legacy can be extraordinary.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

287
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A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is what I will call a likeness.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

288
Q

likeness is what the managers and employees hope they will have actually built when they reach each critical milestone in their journey.

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289
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Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep commitment—almost a conversion—to the likeness that they are trying to create.

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290
Q

The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few metrics by which managers and employees can measure their progress. These metrics enable everyone associated with the enterprise to calibrate their work, keeping them moving together in a coherent way.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

291
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Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued. When that is in place, however, then how the company gets there is typically emergent—

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

292
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The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

293
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I wasn’t too rigid in how I could achieve my purpose.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

294
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remember that this is a process, not an event. It took me years to fully understand my own purpose.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

295
Q

From these parts of my life, I distilled the likeness of what I wanted to become: A man who is dedicated to helping improve the lives of other people A kind, honest, forgiving, and selfless husband, father, and friend A man who just doesn’t just believe in God, but who believes God

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

296
Q

Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

297
Q

For me, defining the likeness of the person I wanted to become was straightforward. However, being deeply committed to actually becoming this type of person was hard.

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298
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we need to aggregate to help us see the big picture. This is far from an accurate way to measure things, but this is the best that we can do.

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

299
Q

I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life’s purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they will ever have discovered. I warn them that their time at school might be the best time to reflect deeply on that question. Fast-paced careers, family responsibilities, and tangible rewards of success tend to swallow up time and perspective.

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In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based

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How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon