Ivan101/Getty Images Personal Code of Ethics
Don't keep your best business thinking to your career.
Clayton M. Christensen
From a magazine (July-August 2010)
summary
Christensen of Harvard Business School teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes these models can help people live better lives. In this article, he explains how to ,...
Editor's Note (2022). To mark our 100th anniversary, we're highlighting 12 articles that we really enjoy. Subscribers have access to all 12 articles at any time, and for non-subscribers, we unlock one per month this year. The first is this classic 2010 article by the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, which explains how we can more purposefully think about the balance between our professional and personal priorities.
Editor's Note (2010). When the Class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their ambitions after graduation could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy was in trouble. They have recalibrated their worldview and definition of success over the past two years.
Students seem to be highly aware of the changes in the world (as the sample of ideas in this article shows). In the spring, harvard business school's graduating class asked Harvard business school professor Clay Christensen to address them — but not about how to apply his principles and ideas to their careers after Harvard Business School. Students want to know how to apply it to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that helped him find meaning in his own life. While Christensen's ideas come from his deep religious beliefs, we believe these strategies can be used by anyone. So we asked him to share these strategies with HBR readers.
Before I published The Innovator's Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then chairman of Intel Corporation. He read one of my early papers on disruptive technologies, and he asked me if I could talk to his direct report explaining my research and what it means for Intel. I was excited and flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the allotted time, but Grove said, "Look, it's already happened." We only have 10 minutes to give you. Tell us what your disruptive model means to Intel. "I said I couldn't do that, and I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the pattern because any comments on Intel only make sense if it was used as background. My explanation went on for 10 minutes when Grove interrupted me. "Listen, I've got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel. "
I insist that I still need 10 minutes to describe how the disruption process works in a very different industry – the steel industry – so that he and his team can understand how disruption works. I talked about how Nucor and other small steel mills started by attacking the lowest end of the market, steel bars, and then moved to the high end, weakening traditional steel mills.
When I finished telling the minimized story, Grove said, "Okay, I get it. This means...", and then went on to articulate the company's strategy to go to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.
Since then, I have thought about it countless times. If I had been tricked into telling Andy Grove how he should have looked at the microprocessor business, I would have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think — and then he made the decision he thought was right.
This experience had a profound impact on me. When people ask me what I think they should do, I rarely answer their questions directly. Instead, I run the problem aloud through one of my models. I will describe how the processes in the model operate in an industry that is completely different from their own. Then, more often, they'll say, "Okay, I get it. "They'll answer their questions more deeply than I do.
My course structure at Harvard is to help my students understand what a good management theory is and how to build it. On this backbone, I attach different models or theories to help students think about the various levels of the general manager's work in stimulating innovation and growth. In each lesson, we look at a company through the lens of these theories —using them to explain how the company is in trouble and to examine which management actions produce the desired outcome.
On the last day of class, I asked my students to turn these theoretical lenses to themselves and find convincing answers to three questions. First, how can I ensure that I am happy in my career? Second, how can I ensure that my relationship with my spouse and family becomes a lasting source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I won't go to jail? While the last question sounds lighthearted, it's not. Of the 32 people in my Rhodes Scholar class, two have spent time in prison. Jeff Quicken of Enron was a classmate of mine at Harvard. These people are good people, but some of the things in their lives have taken them in the wrong direction.
Trading does not produce deep rewards, and this return comes from the cultivation of people.
As students discuss the answers to these questions, I open up my life to them as some sort of case study to illustrate how they can use the theories in our curriculum to guide their life decisions.
One of these theories gives a good insight into the first question—how to ensure we find happiness in our careers—from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives is not money; it is the opportunity to learn, the growth of responsibility, and the recognition of the contributions and achievements of others. I told the students about a certain vision of running the company I started before becoming an academic. In my mind's eye, I saw one of my managers going to work one morning with a relatively high level of self-esteem. Then I imagined her driving home after 10 hours to meet her family, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, unused and degraded. I imagined how her reduced self-esteem profoundly affected the way she interacted with her children. Then, the picture in my head fast-forwarded to another day, and she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling like she had learned a lot, was recognized for achieving something valuable, and had played a major role in the success of some important initiatives. Then I imagined the positive impact this had on her as a spouse and parent. My conclusion is. If done well, management is the noblest profession. No other profession offers so many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for their achievements, and contribute to the success of their teams. More and more MBA students are coming to school, believing that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. This is unfortunate. Trading does not produce deep rewards, and this return comes from the cultivation of people.
I want students to know this when they leave my classroom.
Create a strategy for your life
The theory that helps answer the second question – how can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be a lasting source of happiness? - It focuses on how the strategy is defined and implemented. Its main insight is that a company's strategy is determined by the type of initiatives that management invests in. If a company's resource allocation process is not well managed, it produces results that are very different from management's intentions. Because a company's decision-making system is designed to direct investment to initiatives that provide the most realistic and direct returns, companies forgo investments in initiatives that are critical to their long-term strategy.
Over the years, I witnessed the fate of my Harvard classmates in 1979; I saw more and more people coming to reunion places where they were unhappy, divorced, and estranged from their children. I can assure you that none of them have deliberately adopted a divorce and parenting strategy when they graduate, and these children will be alienated from them. However, many of them have implemented this strategy, which is shocking. Why? They do not put their life purpose at the forefront and at the center when deciding how to use their time, talents, and energy.
Surprisingly, a significant portion of the 900 students Harvard university recruits each year from the best students in the world have barely considered their purpose in life. I tell students that Harvard may be one of their last chances to think deeply about this issue. If they think they'll have more time and energy to reflect later on, they're stupid because life is only going to get harder. You take on a mortgage; you work 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
It has always been crucial for me to have a clear goal in my life. But it's something I had to think about for a long time before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes Scholar, I was in the midst of a very demanding academic program trying to spend an extra year working at Oxford University. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying, thinking about why God had brought me into this world. It's a very challenging commitment because every hour I spend doing this, I'm not learning applied econometrics. I was conflicted and didn't know if I could really afford to take the time out of my studies, but I persevered and eventually figured out my purpose in life.
If I hadn't spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for autocorrelation problems in regression analysis, I would have seriously misused my life. I apply econometric tools a few times a year, but I apply my understanding of the purpose of life every day. It was the only thing I've learned that's the most useful. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their purpose in life, they will look back on it as the most important thing they found at Harvard. If they don't figure it out, they'll set sail without a rudder and be impacted by the rough seas of life. Clarifying one's goals will outweigh activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competencies, disruptive innovation, the four P's and the five forces.
My purpose was to grow up from my religious beliefs, but faith is not the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his goal was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise capable children.
As committed as he is to this cause and to their relationship with each other. His purpose was to focus on family and others – just as my purpose was.
Choosing and successfully pursuing a career is just a tool to achieve your goals. But without purpose, life becomes hollow.
Allocate your resources
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talents will ultimately shape your life strategy.
I have a bunch of "businesses" competing for these resources. I'm trying to build a worthy relationship with my wife, raise wonderful children, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And my problem is exactly the same as the company' problem. My time, energy, and talents are limited. How much should I invest in each of these pursuits?
Assigning choices can make your life very different from what you originally intended. Sometimes that's good. Opportunities you never planned for appeared. But if you invest your resources incorrectly, the results can be bad. When I think of my former classmates who inadvertently invested in an empty and unhappy life, I couldn't help but believe that their troubles had to do with short-term perspectives.
When people with a high demand for achievement — and that includes all Harvard Business school graduates — have an extra half hour or an extra ounce of energy, they unconsciously assign it to activities that produce the most tangible achievements. And our cause provides the most concrete evidence that we are moving forward. You ship a product, you complete a design, you complete a presentation, you complete a sale, you teach a class, you publish a paper, you get paid, you get promoted. In contrast, investing time and effort in your relationships with your spouse and children often doesn't provide the same sense of immediate accomplishment. Children have misconduct every day. It's not until 20 years later that you put your hand on your butt and say, "I've got a good son or a good daughter." "You can ignore your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem like things are getting worse. People who strive for excellence have this unconscious tendency to underinvest in their families and over-invest in their careers – even though intimate and loving relationships with families are the strongest and long-lasting sources of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, you'll find this tendency again and again to be an effort to provide immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives from this perspective, you see the same shocking and sobering pattern: people are allocating fewer and fewer resources to the most important things they once said.
Create a culture
In our curriculum, there is an important model called the "tool of collaboration," which basically says that being a visionary manager is not all what it describes. It's one thing to see the confused future with keen insight and figure out the course corrections that the company must make. But convincing employees who may not see future change, getting them to line up and cooperatively take the company in new directions is another matter. Knowing what tools to use to get the collaboration you need is a key management skill.
The theory arranges these tools along two dimensions—to what extent members of an organization agree on what they get from participating businesses, and to what extent they agree on which actions will produce the desired results. When there is no agreement on either axis, you have to use "tools of power" – coercion, threats, punishment, etc. – to ensure cooperation. Many companies start with this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such a determined role in determining what must be done and how to do it. If the way employees work together to solve these tasks succeeds again and again, consensus begins to form. Edgar Schein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes the process as a mechanism for building culture. Ultimately, people don't even think about whether their way of doing things will lead to success. They accept priorities and follow procedures through instincts and assumptions rather than explicit decisions – which means they have created a culture. Culture, in a convincing but self-evident way, prescribes a mature, acceptable approach for group members to deal with recurring issues. Culture defines priorities for different types of issues. It can be a powerful management tool.
When using this model to solve the question "How can I ensure my family is a source of lasting happiness," my students quickly saw that the simplest tool parents could wield to induce children to cooperate was the motivational tool. However, in adolescence, there is a point where the power tool no longer works. At this time, parents begin to want them to start working with their children at a very young age, to build a culture in the home that allows children to instinctively respect each other, obey their parents, and choose the right things. Families have culture, just like companies. These cultures can be consciously established or inadvertently evolved.
If you want your child to have strong self-esteem and self-confidence, thinking they can solve difficult problems, these qualities won't magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family culture, and you have to think about that very early. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing difficult things and learning effective methods.
Avoid the "marginal cost" error
We have been taught in finance and economics that when evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs and base our decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative brings. We learned in our courses that this doctrine biases companies toward leveraging their past successes rather than guiding them to create the capabilities they need in the future. This approach is good if we know that the future will be exactly the same as in the past. But if the future is different, and almost always different, then that's the wrong thing to do.
This theory solves the third problem I discuss with my students – how to live a life of integrity (away from prison). In our personal lives, when we choose between right and wrong, we often unconsciously adopt the marginal cost theory. A voice in our head said, "Listen, I know as a general rule, most people shouldn't do that. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, this time, it is possible. The marginal cost of doing the wrong thing "only once" always seems temptingly low. It sucks you in, and you never look at where the path ends up and the full cost of that choice. The reason for all manifestations of disloyalty and dishonesty lies in the marginal cost economics of "this one-time."
I wanted to share a story about how I understood the potential harm of "only once" in my own life. I'm a member of the Oxford University basketball team. We did our best to end the season unbeaten. The people on the team were the best friends of my life. We competed in the equivalent of the British National University Games and reached the final four. As a result, the championship match was scheduled for a Sunday. I made a personal commitment to God at the age of 16 that I would never play on a Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He felt incredible. My teammates are the same because I'm the starting center. Everybody on the team came up to me and said, "You have to play." Can't you just break the rules once? "
I was a deeply religious person, so I went and prayed for what I should do. I had a very clear feeling that I shouldn't break my promise, so I didn't play in the championship.
In many ways, it was a small decision — involving one of the thousands of Sundays in my life. Theoretically, I could have crossed that line, just that time, and then stopped doing it. But in retrospect, the logic of resisting temptation was "in this extenuating circumstance, just this time," which has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been an endless stream of extenuating circumstances. If I had crossed the line that time, I would have done it again and again in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned is that it's easier to stick to your principles 100% than it is to stick to them 98%. If you, like some of my former classmates, make concessions to "this one time only", based on marginal cost analysis, you will regret your ending. You have to define for yourself what you're holding on to and draw boundaries in a safe place.
Remember the importance of humility
I got this insight when I was asked to give a class on humility at Harvard. I ask all students to describe the most humble people they know. One characteristic of these humble people is outstanding. They have high self-esteem. They know who they are and they feel good about who they are. We also decided that humility is defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes, but by your respect for others. Good behavior naturally comes from this humility. For example, you'll never steal something from someone else because you respect that person too much. You also don't lie to someone.
Entering the world with humility is essential. When you get into top graduate school, almost all of your learning comes from people who are smarter and more experienced than you are: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you've finished your studies at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you interact with on a daily basis may not be smarter than you are. If your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, then your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble desire to learn something from everyone, your learning opportunities will be limitless. In general, you can only be humble if you feel very good about yourself, and you want to help the people around you feel very good about yourself. When we see people treating others in an abusive, arrogant, or degrading way, their behavior is almost always a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to belittle others to feel good about themselves.
Choose the correct ruler
Last year, I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life could end sooner than I had planned. Thankfully, it now appears that I will be spared. But this experience gave me an important insight into my own life.
I know very well how my ideas generate huge revenue for companies that use my research; I know I've made a substantial impact. But when I faced this disease, I found how unimportant this effect was to me, which was interesting. I came to the conclusion that God's measure of my life was not the dollar, but the lives of everyone I touched.
I think that will be the way we all work. Don't worry about the level of personal prominence you've achieved; worry about the individuals you've helped become better people. This is my last suggestion. Think about the standard by which you will judge your life and make up your mind to live every day so that in the end your life will be judged as a success.
A version of this article appeared in the July-August 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review.
Clayton-M.K. Christensen was a Kim-B-Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
Original address: hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life