Highlights from: How will you measure your life? - Clayton M. Christensen

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?

I learned about the power of this approach in 1997, before I published my first book, The Innovator’s Dilemma I got a call from Andy Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had heard of one of my early academic papers about disruptive innovation, and asked me to come to Santa Clara to explain my research and tell him and his top team what it implied for Intel. A young professor, I excitedly flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Andy say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only ten minutes for you. Tell us what your research means for Intel, so we can get on with things.” I responded, “Andy, I can’t, because I know very little about Intel. The only thing I can do is to explain the theory first; then we can look at the company through the lens that the theory offers.” I then showed him a diagram of my theory of disruption. I explained that disruption happens when a competitor enters a market with a low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior. But the new competitor uses technology and its business model to continually improve its offering until it is good enough to satisfy what customers need. Ten minutes into my explanation, Andy interrupted impatiently: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.” I said, “Andy, I still can’t. I need to describe how this process worked its way through a very different industry, so you can visualize how it works.” I told the story of the steel-mill industry, in which Nucor and other steel mini-mills disrupted the integrated steel-mill giants. The mini-mills began by attacking at the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bar, or rebar—and then step by step moved up toward the high end, to make sheet steel—eventually driving all but one of the traditional steel mills into bankruptcy. When I finished the mini-mill story, Andy said, “I get it. What it means for Intel is …” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the lower-priced Celeron processor. I’ve thought about that exchange a million times since. If I had tried to tell Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, he would have eviscerated my argument. He’s forgotten more than I will ever know about his business. 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.

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.

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.

Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.

The appeal of easy answers—of strapping on wings and feathers—is incredibly alluring. Whether these answers come from writers who are hawking guaranteed steps for making millions, or the four things you have to do to be happy in marriage, we want to believe they will work. But so much of what’s become popular thinking isn’t grounded in anything more than a series of anecdotes. Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen.

You’ll see that without theory, we’re at sea without a sextant. If we can’t see beyond what’s close by, we’re relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.

You might be tempted to try to make decisions in your life based on what you know has happened in the past or what has happened to other people. 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. Instead, using robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of success. The theories in this book are based on a deep understanding of human endeavor—what causes what to happen, and why. They’ve been rigorously examined and used in organizations all over the globe, and can help all of us with decisions that we make every day in our lives, too.

My note :

1. In our career know that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are distinct entities. The hygiene factors cause us to not be dissatisfied and the motivational factors cause us to be satisfied.
2. Have a deliberate strategy and look out for emergent strategies. Eventually balance them both out to come up with the best strategy.
3. Our intended strategy fully depends on the resources we allocate for it. Where we spend our time,energy,resouces determines everything.

Your Highlight on page 17 | location 253-253
Finding Happiness in Your Career

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

Many managers have adopted Jensen and Meckling’s underlying thinking—believing that when you need to convince others that they should do one thing and not another, you just need to pay them to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it. It’s easy, it’s measurable; in essence, you are able to simply delegate management to a formula. Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for example, offering their children a financial reward as an incentive for every A on a report card.

The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. Some work in the most difficult conditions imaginable—disaster recovery zones, countries gripped by famine and flood. They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated. You might dismiss these workers as idealists. But the military attracts remarkable people, too. They commit their lives to serving their country. But they are not doing it for financial compensation. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—working in the military is far from the best-paid job you can take. Yet in many countries, including the United States, the military is considered a highly effective organization.

Well, there is a second school of thought—often called two-factor theory, or motivation 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.

Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the other—is not actually the way the mind works. 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.

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. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes—or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction. You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work. Interestingly, Herzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator.

This is an important insight from Herzberg’s research: 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. They’re not the same thing at all. It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.

So, what are the things that will truly, deeply satisfy us, 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. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from 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.

“This is just for a couple of years. I’ll pay off my loans, get myself in a good financial position, then I’ll go chase my real dreams.” It was not an unreasonable argument. The pressures we all face—providing for our families, meeting our own expectations and those of our parents and friends, and, for some of us, keeping up with our neighbors—are tough. In the case of my classmates (and many graduating classes since), this manifested itself in taking jobs as bankers, fund managers, consultants, and plenty of other well-regarded positions. For some people, it was a choice of passion—they genuinely loved what they did and those jobs worked out well for them. But for others, it was a choice based on getting a good financial return on their expensive degree.

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. Even those engaged in careers that seem to specifically focus on money, like salespeople and traders, are subject to these rules of motivation—it’s just that in these professions, money acts as a highly accurate yardstick of success.

It’s not that some of us are fundamentally different beasts—we might find different things meaningful or enjoyable—but the theory still works the same way for everyone. If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.

I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators, too.

In my assessment, it is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. You must be careful not to confuse correlation with causality in assessing the happiness we can find in different jobs.

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. CHAPTER THREE The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity Understanding what makes us tick is a critical step on the path to fulfillment. But that’s only half the battle. You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. If it were that easy, however, wouldn’t each of us already have done that? Rarely is it so simple. You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities. Managing this part of the strategy process is often the difference

Understanding what makes us tick is a critical step on the path to fulfillment. But that’s only half the battle. You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. If it were that easy, however, wouldn’t each of us already have done that? Rarely is it so simple. You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities.

As Professor Henry Mintzberg taught, 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. In Honda’s case, it was the big-bike market in the United States. 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. At Honda, what was unanticipated were the problems with the big bikes, the costs associated with fixing them, and the opportunity to sell the little Super Cub motorbikes. The unanticipated problems and opportunities then essentially fight the deliberate strategy for the attention, capital, and hearts of the management and employees. The company has to decide whether to stick with the original plan, modify it, or even replace it altogether with one of the alternatives that arises.

In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present.

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. This is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.

Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.

1. 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?” <How Will You Measure Your Life? (Clayton M. Christensen;Karen Dillon;James Allworth)>

Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control? Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing? What evidence do you have? 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.

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. As difficult as it may seem, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. That thinking can be dangerous. You’re only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: “What am I doing with my life?”

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.

As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.

But individuals are far from the only cause of this problem. In fact, if you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find a predisposition toward

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

In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.” Resource allocation works pretty much the same way in our lives and careers. Gloria Steinem framed strategy for her world as Andy Grove did for his: “We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

Here is a way to frame the investments that we make in the strategy that becomes our lives: we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives. These include having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other; raising great children; succeeding in our careers; contributing to our church or community; and so on. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. It’s exactly the same problem that a corporation has. How should we devote our resources to each of these pursuits?

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. How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? 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. You might think you are a charitable person, but how often do you really give your time or money to a cause or an organization that you care about? If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top? Because 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.

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. But there is much more to life than your career. The person you are at work and the amount of time you spend there will impact the person you are outside of work with your family and close friends. 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.

I have to be clear with myself that the long-term payoff of investing my resources in this sphere of my life will be far more profound. Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment—but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.

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, or to take my daughter to a ballet lesson—to keep myself true to what I most value. If I didn’t do this, I know I would be tempted to measure my success that day by having solved a problem rather than getting the time I love with my family. I have to be clear with myself that the long-term payoff of investing my resources in this sphere of my life will be far more profound. Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment—but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won’t work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don’t. If anything, it’s the opposite. If you recount our discussion of emergent and deliberate strategy—the balance between your plans and unanticipated opportunities—then you’ll know that getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

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. In this section, we are going to explore how you can nourish these relationships—and, just as important, avoid damaging them—as you continue upon your life’s journey.

The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But 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.

At a basic level, there are two goals investors have when they put money into a company: growth and profitability. Neither is easy. 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. In other words, 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.

The theory of good money and bad money essentially frames Bhide’s work as a simple assertion. 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. It demands that a new company figures out a viable strategy as fast as and with as little investment as possible—so that the entrepreneurs don’t spend a lot of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy. Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one. Motorola learned this lesson with Iridium. That is why capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital. But the reason why both types of capital appear in the name of the theory is that 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.

If a company has ignored investing in new businesses until it needs those new sources of revenue and profits, it’s already too late. It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.

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. People in their later years in life so often lament that they didn’t keep in better touch with friends and relatives who once mattered profoundly to them. Life just seemed to get in the way. The consequences of letting that happen, however, can be enormous. I’ve known too many people like Steve, who have had to walk through a health struggle or a divorce or a job loss alone—with nobody to provide a sounding board or other means of support.

There’s significant research emerging that demonstrates just how important the earliest months of life are to the development of intellectual capacity. As recounted in our book Disrupting Class, two researchers, Todd Risley and Betty Hart, studied the effects of how parents talk to a child during the first two and a half years of life.

Risley and Hart’s research followed the children they studied as they progressed through school. The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older. And it didn’t matter that just any words were spoken to a child—the way a parent spoke to a child had a significant effect. 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. “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red shirt today?” “Do you think it will rain today?” “Do you remember the time I put your bottle in the oven by mistake?” and so on. Language dancing involves talking to the child about “what if,” and “do you remember,” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”—questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening around him. And it has a profound effect long before a parent might actually expect a child to understand what is being asked. In short, when a parent engages in extra talk, many, many more of the synaptic pathways in the child’s brain are exercised and refined. Synapses are the junctions in the brain where a signal is transmitted from one nerve cell to another. In simple terms, the more pathways that are created between synapses in the brain, the more efficiently connections are formed. This makes the subsequent patterns of thought easier and faster.

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. The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn’t intuitively map in customers’ minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.

Let me share an example from Scott, a friend of mine with three children under the age of five. One day recently, Scott came home from work to find a highly unusual scene—the breakfast dishes still on the table and dinner not started. His instant reaction was that his wife, Barbara, had had a tough day and needed a hand. Without a word, he rolled up his sleeves, cleaned up the breakfast dishes, and started dinner. Partway through, Barbara disappeared. But Scott kept on, making dinner for the kids. He had just started feeding them when he suddenly wondered, where’s Barbara? Tired, but feeling pretty good about himself, he went upstairs to try to figure out where she was. He found her alone in their bedroom. He expected to be thanked for doing all that at the end of an exhausting day at work. But instead Barbara was very upset—at him. He was shocked. He had just done all this for her: What had he done wrong? “How could you ignore me after I’ve had such a difficult day?” Barbara asked. “You think that I’ve ignored you?” Scott responded. “I finished the breakfast dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, fixed dinner, and am partway through feeding our children. How in the world can you think I’ve ignored you?” Just then, it became clear to Scott what had happened. Indeed, what he did was important to get done, and he was trying to be selfless in giving Barbara exactly what he thought she needed. Barbara explained, however, that the day hadn’t been difficult because of the chores. It was difficult because she had spent hours and hours with small, demanding children, and she hadn’t spoken to another adult all day. What she needed most at that time was a real conversation with an adult who cared about her. By doing what he did, he only made Barbara feel guilty and angry about her frustration. Interactions like those between Scott and Barbara occur thousands of times every day in households around the world. We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants. Scott probably wished he had helping hands to get through his tough day at work, so that’s what he offered Barbara when he got home. It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong. A husband may be convinced that he is the selfless one, and also convinced that his wife is being self-centered because she doesn’t even notice everything he is giving her—and vice versa.

Yes, we can do all kinds of things for our spouse, but if we are not focused on the jobs she most needs doing, we will reap frustration and confusion in our search for happiness in that relationship. Our effort is misplaced—we are just making a chocolatier milkshake. 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. I suspect that if we studied marriage from the job-to-be-done lens, we would find that the husbands and wives who are most loyal to each other are those who have figured out the jobs that their partner needs to be done—and then they do the job reliably and well.

This may sound counterintuitive, but 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. If what causes us to fall deeply in love is mutually understanding and then doing each other’s job to be done, then I have observed that what cements that commitment is the extent to which I sacrifice myself to help her succeed and for her to be happy.

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.

We all recognize the importance of giving our kids the best opportunities. Each new generation of parents seems to focus even more on creating possibilities for their children that they themselves never had. With the best of intentions, we hand our children off to a myriad of coaches and tutors to provide them with enriching experiences—thinking that will best prepare our kids for the future. But helping our children in this way can come at a high cost.

The most tangible of the three factors is resources, which include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built. Many resources are visible and often are measurable, so managers can readily assess their value. Most people might think that resources are what make a business successful.

The ways in which those employees interact, coordinate, communicate, and make decisions are known as processes. These enable the resources to solve more and more complicated problems. Processes include the ways that products are developed and made, and the methods by which market research, budgeting, employee development, compensation, and resource allocation are accomplished. Unlike resources, which are often easily seen and measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet. If a company has strong processes in place, managers have flexibility about which employees they put on which assignments—because the process will work regardless of who performs it.

The third—and perhaps 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. Employees at every level will make prioritization decisions—what they will focus on today, and what they’ll put at the bottom of their list. Managers can’t be there to watch over every decision as a company gets bigger. That’s why the larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to ensure employees make, by themselves, prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. It means that successful senior executives need to spend a lot of time articulating clear, consistent priorities that are broadly understood throughout the organization. Over time, a company’s priorities must be in sync with how the company makes money, because employees must prioritize those things that support the company’s strategy, if the company is to survive. Otherwise the decisions they make will be in conflict with the foundation of the business.

The theory of capabilities gives companies the framework to determine when outsourcing makes sense, and when it does not. There are two important considerations. First, you must take a dynamic view of your suppliers’ capabilities. Assume that they can and will change. You should not focus on what the suppliers are doing now, but, rather, focus on what they are striving to be able to do in the future. Second, and most critical of all: figure out what capabilities you will need to succeed in the future. These must stay in-house—otherwise, you are handing over the future of your business.

The Resources, Processes, and Priorities model of capabilities can help us gauge what our children will need to be able to do, given the types of challenges and problems that we know they will confront in their future. The first of the factors that determine what a child can and cannot do is his resources. These include the financial and material resources he has been given or has earned, his time and energy, what he knows, what his talents are, what relationships he has built, and what he has learned from the past. The second group of factors that determine a child’s capabilities are processes. Processes are what your child does with the resources he has, to accomplish and create new things for himself. Just as within a business, they are relatively intangible, but are a large part of what makes each child unique. These include the way he thinks, how he asks insightful questions, how and whether he can solve problems of various types, how he works with others, and so on.

If those describe the resources and processes of a child, the final capability is the child’s personal priorities. They’re not that dissimilar from the priorities we have in our own lives: school, sports, family, work, and faith are all examples. Priorities determine how a child will make decisions in his life—which things in his mind and life he will put to the top of the list, which he will procrastinate doing, and which he will have no interest in doing at all.

To understand how all three work together, let’s continue the example of a child developing an iPad app. If your child has a computer on which to program, and knowledge of how to program an iPad app, he has resources. The way in which he pulls these resources together to create something novel, something that he hasn’t been taught explicitly how to do, to learn as he goes along—these are his processes. And the desire he has to spend his precious free time creating the app, the problem he cares about enough to create the app to solve, the idea of creating something unique, or the fact that he cares that his friends will be impressed—those are the priorities leading him to do it. Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

I worry a lot that many, many parents are doing to their children what Dell did to its personal-computing business—removing the circumstances in which they can develop processes. As a general rule, in prosperous societies we have been outsourcing more and more of the work that, a generation ago, was done “internally” in the home.

When we so heavily focus on providing our children with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences? These are the critical differences between resources and processes in our children’s minds and hearts—and, I fear, the unanticipated residual of outsourcing. When Dell outsourced a part of its business to Asus, Dell gave Asus targets it needed to hit, and problems that it needed to solve. Asus then developed the processes for doing the work—even as Dell’s processes for doing the same work atrophied. Asus honed and expanded those processes so that it could complete more and more sophisticated work. Dell didn’t see that as it was focusing so heavily on resources and reducing its crucial processes, that it was actually undermining its future competitiveness. Many parents are making the same mistake, flooding their children with resources—knowledge, skills, and experiences. And just as with Dell, each of the decisions to do so seems to make sense. We want our kids to get ahead, and believe that the opportunities and experiences we have provided for them will help them do exactly that. But the nature of these activities—experiences in which they’re not deeply engaged and that don’t really challenge them to do hard things—denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they’ll need to succeed in the future.

The end result of these good intentions for our children is that too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others. Self-esteem—the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it”—doesn’t come from abundant resources. Rather, self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.

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

I worry that an entire generation has reached adulthood without the capabilities—particularly the processes—that translate into employment. 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.

I’m not advocating throwing kids straight into the deep end to see whether they can swim. Instead, it’s a case of starting early to find simple problems for them to solve on their own, problems that can help them build their processes—and a healthy self-esteem. As I look back on my own life, I recognize that 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.

Denying children the opportunity to develop their processes is not the only way outsourcing has damaged their capabilities, either. There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values.

I asked Jim and Norma about how they had raised such great children. Of all the gems of wisdom that they shared with me, this insight, from Norma, stood out: “When the kids come home for a family reunion, I like to listen to their banter back and forth about the experiences they had growing up, and which had the greatest impact on their lives. I typically have no memory of the events they recall as being important. And when I ask them about the times when Jim and I sat them down specifically to share what we thought were foundationally important values of our family, well, the kids have no memory of any of them. 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.” It’s a beautiful way of articulating the importance of building the third of the capabilities—priorities. It affects what our children will put first in their lives. In fact, it may be the single most important capability we can give our kids.

You can probably recall similar moments from your own childhood—the times that you picked up something important from your parents that they probably weren’t aware they were sharing. Your parents most likely weren’t thinking consciously about teaching you the right priorities at the time—but simply because they were there with you in those learning moments, those values became your values, too. Which means that 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.

There’s a wonderful conundrum left to us by the Greeks. It was first put to print by the author Plutarch, and it’s known as the Ship of Theseus. As a tribute to the mythical founder of their city—famed for slaying the Minotaur—the Athenians committed to keeping Theseus’s ship seaworthy in the harbor of Athens. As parts of the boat decayed, they were replaced … until eventually, every last part of the boat had been changed. The conundrum was this: given that every last part of it had been replaced, was it still Theseus’s ship? The Athenians still called it Theseus’s Ship … but was it? I want to turn that into a similar philosophical question for you: if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they?

Yes, they are still your children—but you see what I’m getting at. The risk is not that every moment spent with another adult will be indelibly transferring inferior values. Nor is this about making the argument that you need to protect your children from the “big bad world”—that you must spend every waking moment with them. You shouldn’t. Balance is important, and there are valuable lessons your children will gain from facing the challenges that life will throw at them on their own. Rather, the point is that even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all.

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. You can compare with your neighbors and friends how many activities your child is involved in, what instruments he is learning, what sports she is playing. It’s easy to measure and it makes you feel good. 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.

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. This can be difficult for parents to do. So much of our society’s culture is focused on trying to build self-esteem in children by never letting them lose a game, giving them accolades simply for trying their best, and constantly receiving feedback from teachers or coaches that never requires them to think about whether they can do better. From a very young age, many of our children who participate in sports come to expect medals, trophies, or ribbons at the end of a season—simply for participating. Those medals and awards end up in a pile in a corner of their bedroom over the years and quickly become meaningless to those kids. They haven’t really learned anything from them.

You should consciously think about what abilities you want your child to develop, and then what experiences will likely help him get them. So you might have to think about engineering opportunities for your child to have the experiences you believe will help him develop the capabilities he needs for life. That may not be easy, but it will be worthwhile.

Creating experiences for your children doesn’t guarantee that they’ll learn what they need to learn. If that doesn’t happen, you have to figure out why that experience didn’t achieve it. You might have to iterate through different ideas until you get it right. 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.

The challenges your children face serve an important purpose: they will help them hone and develop the capabilities necessary to succeed throughout their lives. Coping with a difficult teacher, failing at a sport, learning to navigate the complex social structure of cliques in school—all those things become “courses” in the school of experience. We know that 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.” 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.

Most of us have—or had—an idyllic image of what our families would be like. The children will be well-behaved, they’ll adore and respect us, we’ll enjoy spending time together, and they’ll make us proud when they are off in the world without us by their side. And yet, as any experienced parent will tell you, wishing for that kind of family and actually having that kind of family are two very different things. One of the most powerful tools to enable us to close the gap between the family we want and the family we get is culture. We need to understand how it works and be prepared to put in the hard yards to influence how it is shaped.

Culture. It is a word we hear so much of on a day-to-day basis, and many of us associate it with different things. In the case of a company, it’s common to describe culture as the visible elements of a working environment: casual Fridays, free sodas in the cafeteria, or whether you can bring your dog into the office. But as MIT’s Edgar Schein—one of the world’s leading scholars on organizational culture—explains, those things don’t define a culture. They’re just artifacts of it. An office that allows T-shirts and shorts could also be a very hierarchical place. Would that still be a “casual” culture? Culture is far more than general office tone or guidelines. 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.

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 can be built through the steps noted above. It needs to be shaped the way that you want it to be in your family, and you have to think about this early on. If you want your family to have a culture of kindness, then the first time one of your kids approaches a problem where kindness is an option—help him choose it, and then help him succeed through kindness. Or if he doesn’t choose it, call him on it and explain why he should have chosen differently. That’s not to say that any of this is easy. First, you come into a family with a culture from the family in which you grew up. There’s a good chance your spouse’s family culture will have been fundamentally different from yours. Just getting the two of you to agree on anything is a miracle. Then add kids to the equation—they’re born with their own attitudes and wiring. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but that’s exactly why it’s so important to understand what type of culture you want and to proactively pursue it.

My wife, Christine, and I started, when we were newly engaged, with an end goal—a specific family culture—in mind. We didn’t think about it in terms of culture, but that’s what we were doing. We decided in a deliberate fashion that we wanted our children to love each other and to support each other. We decided we wanted our children to have an instinct to obey God. We decided we wanted them to be kind. And, finally, we decided that we wanted them to love work. 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, as Schein’s theory shows. It entails choosing what activities we pursue, and what outcomes we need to achieve, so that as a family, when we have to perform those activities again, we all think: “This is how we do it.”

I’m actually very glad we didn’t have enough money to buy a perfectly finished house when our children were young. We stretched so far to buy that first wreck of a house that we later couldn’t afford to pay tradesmen to fix it up for us. Everything that needed to be fixed had to be fixed by us and by the kids. Now, most people would think of this as a complete chore. But inadvertently, we had moved our family into an environment rich in opportunities for us to work together. As tempting as it might otherwise have been, we couldn’t outsource it—we simply could not afford to. This meant there wasn’t a wall or a ceiling torn down, built up, plastered, or painted without the kids helping us to do it. We applied the same principles as with mowing the lawn—making it fun, and always thanking them. But in this instance, there was additional positive reinforcement: every time the kids walked into any room in the house, they’d see the wall and say: “I painted that wall.” Or “I sanded it.” Not only would they remember the fun we had in doing it together, but they felt the pride from seeing what they’d achieved. They learned to love work.

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. You need to be sure that when you ask your children to do something, or tell your spouse you’re going to do something, you hold to that and follow through. It sounds obvious; most of us want to try to be consistent. But in the pressures of day-to-day living, that can be tough. There will be many days when enforcing the rules is harder on a parent than it is on a child. 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. Children might feel “success” in the short term by getting what they want in beating up a sibling, or talking back to a parent who finally relents to an unreasonable demand. Parents who let such behavior slide are essentially building a family culture—teaching their child that this is the way the world works, and that they can achieve their goals the same way each time.

Again, our choices for a family culture are not necessarily the right ones for everyone. What’s important to understand is how culture is built, so that you have a chance to create the culture you want. In thinking about this, it might be helpful to remember the process by which strategy is defined. There are deliberate plans, and emergent problems and opportunities. These compete against one another in the resource allocation process, to determine which receive

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. What does your family value? Is it creativity? Hard work? Entrepreneurship? Generosity? Humility? What do the kids know they have to do that will get their parents to say, “Well done”? 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.

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. For the entrant, in contrast, there is no marginal-cost item on the menu. If it makes sense, then you do the full-cost alternative. Because they are new to the scene, in fact, the full cost is the marginal cost. 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.”

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. 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. The first step down that path is taken with a small decision. You justify all the small decisions that lead up to the big one and then you get to the big one and it doesn’t seem so enormous anymore. You don’t realize the road you are on until you look up and see you’ve arrived at a destination you would have once considered unthinkable.

If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful, because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again. Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.

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.

But if an organization has a clear and compelling purpose, its impact and legacy can be extraordinary. The purpose of the company will serve as a beacon, focusing employees’ attention on what really matters. And that purpose will allow the company to outlive any one manager or employee. Apple, Disney, the KIPP Schools (chartered schools in inner-city neighborhoods that have remarkable results), and the Aravind Eye Hospital (an eye surgery hospital in India that serves more patients than any other eye hospital in the world) are examples of this.

The Three Parts of Purpose A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is what I will call a likeness. By analogy, a master painter often will create a pencil likeness that he has seen in his mind, before he attempts to create it in oils. A likeness of a company is what the key leaders and employees want the enterprise to have become at the end of the path that they are on. The word likeness is important here, because it isn’t something that employees will excitedly “discover” that the company has become at some point in the future. Rather, the likeness is what the managers and employees hope they will have actually built when they reach each critical milestone in their journey. 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. The purpose can’t begin and end on paper. Because issues demanding answers about priorities will repeatedly emerge in unpredictable ways, employees without this deep conversion will find that the world will compromise the likeness by wave after wave of extenuating circumstances. 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. These three parts—likeness, commitment, and metrics—comprise a company’s purpose.

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—as opportunities and challenges emerge and are pursued.

Understanding the three parts composing the purpose of my life—a likeness, a commitment, and a metric—is the most reliable way I know of to define for yourself what your purpose is, and to live it in your life every day. Finally, please remember that this is a process, not an event. It took me years to fully understand my own purpose.

In the long run, clarity about purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, the five forces, and other key business theories we teach at Harvard. What’s true for them is true for you, too. If you take the time to figure out your purpose in life, I promise that you will look back on it as the most important thing you will have ever learned.

In the words of Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”