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

Question 1

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

Answer 1

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

Question 2

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.

Answer 2

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

Question 3

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?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

The Difference Between What to Think and How to Think

Answer 4

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

Question 5

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.

Answer 5

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

Question 6

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.

Answer 6

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

Question 7

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.

Answer 7

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

Question 8

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

Answer 8

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

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

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

Question 10

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

Answer 10

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

Question 11

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

Answer 11

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

Question 12

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

Answer 12

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

Question 13

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.

Answer 13

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

Question 14

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

Answer 14

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

Question 15

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

Answer 15

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

Question 16

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.

Answer 16

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

Question 17

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.

Answer 17

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

Question 18

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.

Answer 18

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

Question 19

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.

Answer 19

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

Question 20

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

Answer 20

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

Question 21

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.

Answer 21

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

Question 22

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.

Answer 22

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

Question 23

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

Answer 23

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

Question 24

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.

Answer 24

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

Question 25

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.

Answer 25

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

Question 26

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.

Answer 26

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

Question 27

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.

Answer 27

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

Question 28

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

Answer 28

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

Question 29

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.

Answer 29

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

Question 30

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.

Answer 30

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

Question 31

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.

Answer 31

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

Question 32

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.

Answer 32

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

Question 33

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.

Answer 33

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

Question 34

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

Answer 34

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

Question 35

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.

Answer 35

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

Question 36

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.

Answer 36

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

Question 37

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

Answer 37

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

Question 38

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.

Answer 38

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

Question 39

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

Answer 39

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

Question 40

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.

Answer 40

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

Question 41

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

Answer 41

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

Question 42

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.

Answer 42

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

Question 43

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?”

Answer 43

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

Question 44

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.

Answer 44

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

Question 45

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.

Answer 45

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

Question 46

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.

Answer 46

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

Question 47

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.

Answer 47

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

Question 48

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.

Answer 48

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

Question 49

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.

Answer 49

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

Question 50

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.

Answer 50

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

Question 51

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

Answer 51

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

Question 52

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

Answer 52

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

Question 53

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.

Answer 53

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

Question 54

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.

Answer 54

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

Question 55

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.

Answer 55

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

Question 56

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.

Answer 56

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

Question 57

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

Answer 57

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

Question 58

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.

Answer 58

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

Question 59

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.

Answer 59

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

Question 60

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.

Answer 60

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

Question 61

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

Answer 61

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

Question 62

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

Answer 62

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

Question 63

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

Answer 63

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

Question 64

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

Answer 64

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

Question 65

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.

Answer 65

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

Question 66

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

Answer 66

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

Question 67

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

Answer 67

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

Question 68

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

Answer 68

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

Question 69

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.

Answer 69

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

Question 70

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

Answer 70

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

Question 71

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

Answer 71

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

Question 72

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.

Answer 72

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

Question 73

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.

Answer 73

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

Question 74

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

Answer 74

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

Question 75

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

Answer 75

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

Question 76

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.”

Answer 76

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

Question 77

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.

Answer 77

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

Question 78

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

Answer 78

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

Question 79

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.

Answer 79

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

Question 80

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.

Answer 80

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

Question 81

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.

Answer 81

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

Question 82

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.

Answer 82

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

Question 83

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

Answer 83

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

Question 84

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.

Answer 84

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

Question 85

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

Answer 85

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

Question 86

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?”

Answer 86

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

Question 87

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.

Answer 87

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

Question 88

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.

Answer 88

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

Question 89

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

Answer 89

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

Question 90

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.

Answer 90

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

Question 91

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.

Answer 91

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

Question 92

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

Answer 92

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

Question 93

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.

Answer 93

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

Question 94

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

Answer 94

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

Question 95

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.”

Answer 95

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

Question 96

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.

Answer 96

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

Question 97

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

Answer 97

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

Question 98

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.

Answer 98

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

Question 99

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.

Answer 99

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

Question 100

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

Answer 100

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

Question 101

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.

Answer 101

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

Question 102

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;

Answer 102

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

Question 103

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.

Answer 103

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

Question 104

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

Answer 104

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

Question 105

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;

Answer 105

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

Question 106

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.

Answer 106

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

Question 107

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

Answer 107

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

Question 108

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

Answer 108

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

Question 109

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.

Answer 109

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

Question 110

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.

Answer 110

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

Question 111

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

Answer 111

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

Question 112

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.

Answer 112

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

Question 113

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.

Answer 113

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

Question 114

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.

Answer 114

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

Question 115

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

Answer 115

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

Question 116

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.

Answer 116

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

Question 117

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.

Answer 117

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

Question 118

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.

Answer 118

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

Question 119

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,

Answer 119

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

Question 120

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

Answer 120

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

Question 121

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.

Answer 121

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

Question 122

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.

Answer 122

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

Question 123

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.

Answer 123

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

Question 124

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.

Answer 124

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

Question 125

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.

Answer 125

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

Question 126

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

Answer 126

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

Question 127

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.

Answer 127

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

Question 128

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.

Answer 128

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

Question 129

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.

Answer 129

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

Question 130

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

Answer 130

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

Question 131

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

Answer 131

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

Question 132

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.

Answer 132

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

Question 133

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

Answer 133

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

Question 134

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.

Answer 134

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

Question 135

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.

Answer 135

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

Question 136

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

Answer 136

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

Question 137

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.

Answer 137

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

Question 138

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.

Answer 138

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

Question 139

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.

Answer 139

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

Question 140

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.

Answer 140

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

Question 141

“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.

Answer 141

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

Question 142

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.”

Answer 142

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

Question 143

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.

Answer 143

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

Question 144

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

Answer 144

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

Question 145

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.

Answer 145

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

Question 146

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.

Answer 146

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

Question 147

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.

Answer 147

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

Question 148

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

Answer 148

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

Question 149

What Job Are You Being Hired For?

Answer 149

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

Question 150

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.

Answer 150

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

Question 151

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.

Answer 151

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

Question 152

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.

Answer 152

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

Question 153

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.

Answer 153

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

Question 154

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.

Answer 154

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

Question 155

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

Answer 155

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

Question 156

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

Answer 156

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

Question 157

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.

Answer 157

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

Question 158

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?

Answer 158

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

Question 159

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

Answer 159

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

Question 160

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,

Answer 160

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

Question 161

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.

Answer 161

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

Question 162

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.

Answer 162

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

Question 163

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.

Answer 163

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

Question 164

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.

Answer 164

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

Question 165

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

Answer 165

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

Question 166

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.

Answer 166

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

Question 167

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.

Answer 167

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

Question 168

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.

Answer 168

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

Question 169

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

Answer 169

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

Question 170

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.

Answer 170

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

Question 171

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.

Answer 171

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

Question 172

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.

Answer 172

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

Question 173

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?”

Answer 173

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

Question 174

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.

Answer 174

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

Question 175

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.

Answer 175

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

Question 176

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.”

Answer 176

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

Question 177

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

Answer 177

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

Question 178

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.

Answer 178

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

Question 179

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.

Answer 179

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

Question 180

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

Answer 180

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

Question 181

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.

Answer 181

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

Question 182

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

Answer 182

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

Question 183

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.

Answer 183

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

Question 184

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

Answer 184

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

Question 185

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

Answer 185

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

Question 186

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

Answer 186

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

Question 187

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

Answer 187

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

Question 188

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

Answer 188

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

Question 189

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.

Answer 189

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

Question 190

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.

Answer 190

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

Question 191

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—

Answer 191

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

Question 192

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.

Answer 192

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

Question 193

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

Answer 193

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

Question 194

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

Answer 194

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

Question 195

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

Answer 195

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

Question 196

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?

Answer 196

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

Question 197

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.

Answer 197

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

Question 198

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.

Answer 198

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

Question 199

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.

Answer 199

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

Question 200

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

Answer 200

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

Question 201

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

Answer 201

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

Question 202

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

Answer 202

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

Question 203

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.

Answer 203

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

Question 204

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.

Answer 204

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

Question 205

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.

Answer 205

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

Question 206

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.

Answer 206

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

Question 207

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

Answer 207

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

Question 208

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.

Answer 208

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

Question 209

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.

Answer 209

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

Question 210

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.

Answer 210

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

Question 211

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

Answer 211

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

Question 212

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

Answer 212

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

Question 213

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

Answer 213

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

Question 214

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

Answer 214

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

Question 215

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.

Answer 215

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

Question 216

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

Answer 216

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

Question 217

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

Answer 217

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

Question 218

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

Answer 218

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

Question 219

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.

Answer 219

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

Question 220

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

Answer 220

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

Question 221

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

Answer 221

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

Question 222

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.

Answer 222

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

Question 223

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.

Answer 223

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

Question 224

Children Learn When They Are Ready to Learn

Answer 224

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

Question 225

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

Answer 225

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

Question 226

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.”

Answer 226

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

Question 227

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.

Answer 227

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

Question 228

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

Answer 228

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

Question 229

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.

Answer 229

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

Question 230

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.

Answer 230

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

Question 231

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.

Answer 231

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

Question 232

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.

Answer 232

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

Question 233

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

Answer 233

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

Question 234

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.

Answer 234

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

Question 235

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

Answer 235

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

Question 236

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?”

Answer 236

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

Question 237

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.

Answer 237

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

Question 238

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.

Answer 238

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

Question 239

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

Answer 239

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

Question 240

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.

Answer 240

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

Question 241

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.

Answer 241

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

Question 242

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

Answer 242

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

Question 243

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.

Answer 243

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

Question 244

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

Answer 244

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

Question 245

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.”

Answer 245

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

Question 246

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.

Answer 246

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

Question 247

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

Answer 247

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

Question 248

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.

Answer 248

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

Question 249

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.

Answer 249

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

Question 250

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

Answer 250

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

Question 251

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.

Answer 251

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

Question 252

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.

Answer 252

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

Question 253

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.

Answer 253

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

Question 254

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.

Answer 254

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

Question 255

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

Answer 255

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

Question 256

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

Answer 256

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

Question 257

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.

Answer 257

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

Question 258

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?

Answer 258

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

Question 259

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

Answer 259

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

Question 260

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,

Answer 260

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

Question 261

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.

Answer 261

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

Question 262

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.

Answer 262

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

Question 263

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.

Answer 263

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

Question 264

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.

Answer 264

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

Question 265

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

Answer 265

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

Question 266

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.

Answer 266

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

Question 267

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.

Answer 267

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

Question 268

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.

Answer 268

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

Question 269

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

Answer 269

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

Question 270

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.

Answer 270

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

Question 271

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.

Answer 271

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

Question 272

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.

Answer 272

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

Question 273

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?”

Answer 273

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

Question 274

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.

Answer 274

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

Question 275

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.

Answer 275

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

Question 276

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.”

Answer 276

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

Question 277

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

Answer 277

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

Question 278

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.

Answer 278

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

Question 279

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.

Answer 279

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

Question 280

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

Answer 280

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

Question 281

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.

Answer 281

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

Question 282

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

Answer 282

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

Question 283

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.

Answer 283

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

Question 284

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

Answer 284

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

Question 285

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

Answer 285

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

Question 286

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

Answer 286

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

Question 287

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

Answer 287

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

Question 288

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

Answer 288

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

Question 289

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.

Answer 289

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

Question 290

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.

Answer 290

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

Question 291

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—

Answer 291

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

Question 292

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.

Answer 292

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

Question 293

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

Answer 293

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

Question 294

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

Answer 294

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

Question 295

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

Answer 295

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

Question 296

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?

Answer 296

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

Question 297

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.

Answer 297

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

Question 298

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.

Answer 298

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

Question 299

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.

Answer 299

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

Question 300

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

Answer 300

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