How Will You Measure Your Life?
I have just finished reading this inspirational little book by the late Clayton Christensen. In 2010 Christensen gave a speech to HBS’s graduating class where he used his research and thinking about business to lay out guidelines for meaning and happiness in our personal and family lives. The book: How Will You Measure Your Life? builds on his original talk and, in collaboration with James Allworth and Karen Dillon, presents a series of parallels between struggles and successes in business and ways we might use these known outcomes to teach us ways to live.
As I write these Words of Wisdom and think out loud about how we use our wisdom to lead smarter, and I hope more fulfilled, lives, two facts are known to me that were not present at the time Christensen and his colleagues wrote this book (Copyright 2012). 1. Sadly, Christensen died on January 23, 2020; 2. Covid-19 and all of its accompanying complexities are present in our lives. Reading the book with this background, Christensen’s prose made even more powerful statements about how we might choose to work and live. If we are in the privileged position of being able to be in control of that choice (and not everyone is), I believe it is our number one priority to exercise it, and perhaps to model for others how life can be led smartly and successfully.
I want to focus on Chapter 7 in Christensen’s book, entitled “Sailing Your Kids on Theseus’s Ship.” The chapter begins with an account of the success and demise of Dell and ends with a brief description of the ship in the chapter’s title, a ship kept in the harbor of Athens. Plutarch tells the story of how the Athenians kept the ship alive by continually replacing its parts, as they became worn, as a perpetual tribute to Theseus.
Dell, a computer manufacturing company enjoyed enormous success in the early 1990s by employing a disruptive business model. Low price computers (sold by mail or over the Web); modular products (allowing customers to choose what they wanted); and third, efficient use of capital creating more sales and profits per dollar of its assets. Dell’s partnership with Asus, a Taiwan-based company, allowed Dell to succeed in these ways. Over time, Asus proposed different ways in which it could help Dell achieve their goals more efficiently and cost-effectively. Dell said yes to each proposal until in fact Asus could build the whole computer and have their own distribution-systems. You might know the rest of the story.
In connecting this account to our own lives, Christensen outlines our need “to understand what capabilities are, and which of them will be critical for the future….” Jumping to my interpretation of Christensen’s cautionary tale, I think of the skills and capacities that are unique to your institution, your business, that which you are uniquely good at, that which makes you successful. A smart leader absolutely knows what these capabilities are, how to inculcate them within the organization and how to ensure they are learned and improved upon. That same leader has their eye on the future, always.
A theme developed in this chapter and throughout the book relates to how we might raise or teach children; what we actually need them to know how to do and not have done for them. This approach is surely key to your team, your employees: know your unique purpose, understand your capabilities and build upon these foundations. Christensen goes on, in the next chapter, to highlight what he calls “The School of Experience.” He urges us to place importance on the role of lived experience in our hiring and talent management.
Oh, the relevance of the ship in the harbor of Athens in ancient times? Apparently so many parts ultimately became replaced that the question was: Is this still Theseus’s ship? If values and priorities are gained too substantially from other people, asks Christensen, are you outsourcing too much and losing your core ideas?
And now that I have read this inspirational little volume, I am ready for Christensen’s seminal volume: The Innovator’s Dilemma.