Book Review: How Will You Measure Your Life?

Writing this column for the past several weeks has been hard for me. How I wish it were the only thing I could do. But scrambling to live, I’m forced to attend to other matters. They are namely matters that enable me to have a roof over my head, but, as a result, give me little time to focus on global entrepreneurs and global innovations in the detailed and analytical manner both deserve. As such, I’m forced to choose between quantity (getting material out) and quality (getting the story right). For me, quality wins.  After reading Clay Christensen’s new book, How Will You Measure Your Life?, I’m relieved to know that’s spot-on.

Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, rose to fame with The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book that looks at how companies stay cutting-edge and relevant through disruption. It caught the attention of many Silicon Valley stars, most prominently former Intel chief Andy Grove, who famously asked Christensen to talk about what disruptive innovation meant for Intel. “But instead of telling him what to think,” Christensen writes in his latest book’s first chapter, “I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.” How Will You Measure Your Lifestrives for a similar goal. Only Christensen and his co-authors, James Allworth and Karen Dillon, hope that goal is a worthy and fulfilling life.

“Finding happiness” is the header titles for the respective sections of the approximately 200-page book (except the last one which he calls “Staying Out of Jail”). That is its only flaw. Though Christensen presents his material in self-help jargon, it avoids the maudlin and illusionary comfort most in the “you can do it too!” genre render. There is no focus on explanations or exceptionalism here. Christensen anchors How Will You Measure Your Lifeon the opposite premise: you’re not special. Life, it points out, while rewarding, is hard. So too must how we grapple with it. Christensen boils that down to accepting, working with and appreciating what we have. Purpose and process, he says, are key factors.

Christensen devotes the end of his book to purpose, asking readers to think about the lives ahead of them: who, not what, did they want to be? He asks that people not confuse purpose with priorities, which is a knee-jerk default in today’s hyper-connected multi-tasking world. We’ve all got things to do, it argues, but how do those things you’re doing impact you? It is an appropriate conclusion to a book that asks us to question our decisions by thinking ahead and, more importantly, outside of ourselves.

“Many products fail,” Christensen writes, “because companies are developed from the wrong perspective…We go into them thinking about what we want rather than what is important to the other person.” He uses milk shakes as an example. Asked by a “big fast-food restaurant” to advise them on how to “ramp up sales of their milk shakes,” despite repeated improvements. “I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to ‘hire’ a milk shake?” he posits, “bringing a completely different perspective” to the problem.

Interestingly, all of the books problems are addressed through business case studies. While Christensen does regale us with a personal anecdote about how his mother shared with him her thoughts about how she would mend a pair of socks in order to make a point about empathy, How Will You Measure Your Life provides concrete examples from experiences incurred by big brands such as Dell, Netflix, Honda and IKEA. This helps anchor the book at the practical intersection of life and work. While morality and conscious dominate in this book, it avoids earnest idealism. In many ways, though it never explicitly says so, it argues against it.

What it argues for is hard work, which is harder than you may think. Today’s world provides too many scapegoats and shortcuts. That’s what How Will You Measure Your Life is trying to stop. Or else Christensen says you’ll be “set off in the wrong direction.” He uses his former HBS classmate Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling as an example. “When his entire career unraveled with his conviction on multiple federal felony charges relating to Enron’s financial collapse, it not only shocked me that he had gone wrong, but how spectacularly he had done so.” That, Christensen says, was probably a result of “just this once..” or marginal thinking.

Marginal thinking is just that, seeing everything from the margins – a narrow purview. Problem with that Christensen says is that when you’re looking at things from the sidelines, you’re not seeing the whole picture or considering all options, including who and what you want to be. That’s what happened to Blockbuster, Christensen says, when it ignored Netflix when it rolled out DVD by post. And we know how that turned out.

To avoid this fate, Christensen says, “you need to decide what kind of person you want to be and what you stand for – and how often you want to stand for it; not some of the time, not most of the time – but all the time.” All the time – hard work, hardly ideal.

Hardly ideal is how I sometimes feel about the pieces I’ve put together for Entreventures. On those days I let the deadline pass. That annoys a great many, including me. But with a plethora of information generated by an even greater number of so-call “experts,” it seems only right to give readers well researched and thought through material. Quality counts. That’s how I want you to measure me.

How Will You Measure Your Life hits bookstands tomorrow.

Source: Forbes