As we turn the page on a new year, there’s a tendency to think more broadly about our life and career, reflecting on and evaluating what’s working and what we’d like to be different.
This book is an excellent companion to those reflections of the past year and intentions for the new year.
The main author Clayton Christensen is a Harvard business professor who’s written several books and teaches about business strategies. Through his classes, and then in a powerful graduation speech, Christensen invites students to apply those business strategies to their lives and careers as a way to create – to measure – a fulfilled life. This book invites us to do the same.
This approach is fascinating and seems to hold up well as a way to guide our decisions toward a meaningful life and career. As he states, the book isn’t about teaching us what to think, but HOW to think.
It’s divided into three sections: Career, Relationships and Integrity – or what he calls ‘staying out of jail’. This last section is his way of addressing how many of his own college classmates ended up either in jail or in failed business and relationships. Yikes.
For each section he shares several business strategies which can help us plan, implement and then measure our life so that it’s fulfilling and meaningful to us and our circles.
For instance, in the career section, the three main strategies are:
1) Hygiene vs motivation factors
2) Deliberate vs emergent strategies
3) Resource allocation
Let’s take a deeper look at that first one: Hygiene vs motivation factors.
Hygiene factors are those we can more easily describe or see such as salary, benefits, schedule, title/status.
For businesses, if they just focus on hygiene factors for employee satisfaction, they run up against an interesting wrinkle in motivation theory. One of Christensen’s fellow Harvard colleagues discovered that if hygiene factors are improved, you’re not suddenly going to love your job anymore, as he states here on page 33…
“At best you just won’t HATE it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but the absence of job dissatisfaction.”
So while it’s important to have good hygiene factors in place – those are table stakes so speak. What leads to us LOVING our jobs are the motivation factors.
These are the intrinsic or internal factors which drive each person individually, such as: is the work challenging, does it provide opportunities for recognition, agency, responsibility, personal growth.
This strategy is fairly straightforward for how it applies to businesses and then to individuals. For some of the other strategies, Christensen uses business case studies to help us see them in action and then deftly relates them to personal experiences – sometimes his own, sometimes from friends, students or colleagues.
For instance, he discusses how Honda tried to get into the large, cruiser type motorcycles and compete in the same market as Harley-Davidson, but found more success when they ‘stumbled’ into the dirt bike market. He then suggests we set out with intentional – or deliberate – strategies, but be open to the opportunities which emerge as we move through our life and career.
He then ends each chapter with a really nice summary of how this strategy relates to the overall vision of a fulfilling life.
The Relationship section leans very heavily on parenting, yet as someone who’s not a parent, I found that while the specifics didn’t apply to me, the strategies he mentioned could absolutely be applied to relationships in general.
Overall, I definitely enjoyed this book. It’s easy to read, flows well and provides inspiring and practical ways to approach our life and career as we think about how will we measure our life?
Have you read this book or watched a video of his speech? If so let me know what your top takeaways are!
