"How Will You Measure Your Life?"

Introduction

Clayton Christensen is an excellent writer, philosopher, or a genuinely deep thinker. I like reading his books because they are riddled with analogies and examples of the theories and principles he is trying to portray. These theories aren't so much correlating ideas or trying to prove causation but trying to see the underlying the principles. And if we are able to identify those principles and test them for anomalies, we can use them in the future to predict outcomes and behavior. A great example of a principle is that we will sacrifice our wants to fulfill our needs.

We all have an inherent sense of survival. The problem with this principle is our ability to identify what are truly wants and what are truly needs. Not all of our bills and expenses are truly needs as much as they are a consequence of a want or lifestyle choice. We have an inherent needs to be to happy, to love, and to be loved and sadly, it is highly common for people to compromise their own happiness for the sake of their careers. So how do we avoid this? We can be more intentional in our choices. We need to develop a strategy.

Strategy is the concept that once a target or goal is identified, you develop a process on how to get there. You allocate resources based on prioritizing key factors and using a continuous feedback loop to check your progress on moving you forward towards your end game. So if this describes the general concept of answering the question of how, the real question is answering what... What truly motivates us?

Motivational Theories

Corporations and businesses have tried to answer that question for years with their employees and workers. The most commonly accepted theory for a long time was the "Incentive Theory." Financial incentives align desired behavior through equations based on debits and credits. You positively or negatively reinforce behaviors through money. The problem was that it didn't work. There is only a specific threshold where this did cause behavioral changes and a point where it simply didn't matter any more. The next iteration was no longer one-dimensional but a two-dimensional concept called "Motivation Theory." The two factors are satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Normally, we would assume that these are polar opposites because of the roots of the words linguistically however, in the scale we want to think of them as a x- and y-axis. Satisfaction is influenced by intrinsic characteristics like being challenged at work, receiving recognition or responsibility, or obtaining personal growth. Dissatisfaction is related to things like hygiene and compensation. Money isn't a constraint if you have learned to live within your means. Money is not bad but it is also not a motivator. It is simply an easy comparison tool. So back to our original question of identifying what motivates us, it goes back to the things that increase satisfaction. Managers directly influence 8-10 hours of an individual employee's daily life with a variety of opportunities. They can give them more responsibility. They can challenge them by asking them to do something where success will only be reached by learning something new.

The challenge for managers is that we clearly need to have a plan but part of that has to include planning to be flexible. We can have both a deliberate and emergent strategy. These will fight one another for attention and resources so there has to be a balance between problems and opportunities. Before moving forward, do you have enough information to answer the question: "What has to be proven for this to work?" Once answered an initial strategy defined, we have to review how successful we were in rewarding and measuring the behaviors we wanted to control. Do the interests of the employees and the overall organization match? How do we actually spend our time and money? Is our focus on short-term or long-term goals? Even the journey towards a goal can be a motivator in and of itself.

Dr. Christensen describes a time with his children when they decided as a family to construct a tree house. They picked the tree, bought the materials, and worked on it for months. They designed, cut, and built the tree house and each time there were visitors over, it was a topic of pride for the family in discussing the progress they were making. What fascinated Clayton was the fact that once it was completed, the children hardly, if ever, used the thing. The motivating factor was the journey itself in actually building something. In my family, we had a saying that described this phenomenon: "The purpose of the task was to build the boat." As a little kid, I had issues remembering, nevertheless saying, the word "relationship," so I mentally shortened it to a more exciting word, "ship." We never did end up "building a boat" but a kid can always dream, right? We did however build fantastic relationships with all of my family members because we took the time to work together often as a team.

Relationships

Relationships are key in business in so many ways. I personally am passionate about understanding the value of people. If you invest in your relationships now, you have the ability to rely on them later. It is similar to a business where in the initial stages there are high startup costs where the company has to invest all its capital in original strategies. Over time, the strategy has to change and transition from being patient for growth and impatient for profits, making quick decisions as cheaply as possible, to transitioning to the opposite and trying to trying to scale quickly. The company had to be adaptable and pivot strategies, leveraging what they had built so far. Once the company is ready to scale, the why of a purchase is more important than price comparisons.

Growing companies or any person in marketing can see the importance of empathy. The value of understanding what's important to other people helps us see how we need to position ourselves with our clients. Is a combination of product and experience trump price? What is "the job to be done?" This type of interaction with customers require communication more than assumptions. The same is true of our personal relationships: Our wants and needs are going to be different than our partner's. Real commitment comes from finding someone who you want to make happy and will sacrifice for. From my own experience, sacrifice deepens our personal commitment so be careful that what or who you're sacrificing for is truly worth it.

The one relationship that should never need to be questioned in terms of worth is family. The family is a place where we are free to be ourselves and where we can make mistakes. Parents have the opportunity to teach responsibility, practice problem-solving and failure, work, and various other values. What is even more important than giving kids opportunities (which might in itself be a lost opportunity) is to challenge them. If we learn when we are ready to learn, then it is a benefit to our children to have obstacles in their path that they can overcome rather than creating the expectation that as their parents, we will clear their path for them and give them things. By all means, we should help and my parents definitely work alongside me but I wouldn't recognize or value things the same way if they came to me freely and without any real effort on my part. The terms that Dr. Christensen uses are: resources, processes, and priorities.

Measuring and Learning

Resources are physical, measurable, tangible assets. These include things like skills, talents, and knowledge. The debate on resources is whether we are born with those skills or whether they can develop "the right stuff." Morgan McCall's High Flyers believes that these better skills can be hone along our way through life from learning by experience. Instead of looking for people that could have the skills that are necessary, asking whether they have actually been in that situation. As individuals, we should look for ways to practice skills and not shy away from challenging situations. Solving problems or creating opportunities are essential skills.

Processes are how we use those resources to solve problems. One of the first things we have to do to find a solution is to understand the real problem. This requires communication, decision making, and other skills that refine the manner in which or how we ask questions, work, or solve problems. Processes play a bigger role than resources so what processes are already in place? If those processes aren't established, practice with small experiences before it becomes absolutely necessary. Celebrate success and celebrate failure. Set high goals. Fix things yourself and become self-reliant. Once we understand the "how," the next step understanding the "why."

Priorities are defined as strategic direction, major investments, or core values. Our biggest concern is making sure that we are the ones that truly define those in our lives and in our families. The "way we do things" can be described as the culture. It is the autopilot of decision-making or instinctual response. This is defined early on in any relationship, business or personal or otherwise, as weighing the response to a specific process to see if it meets minimum requirements or expectations. Once established, those responses are assumed to be okay from then on so it is important to know what kind of culture you want to create early on or even before the situation comes up and then consistently follow through and control the bad and celebrate the good behavior. The way we establish that norm is by solving challenges together repeatedly.

Progressing Towards Goals

Now that we have discussed all the parts to decision making, we can put it all together. If we can have an idea of what things will look like at a critical milestone in the future that is on our path to our ultimate goal, we have a vision of a "likeness." It is important to have these smaller goals so that we can commit to that likeness. We measure our progress on reaching our goals using metrics. So although we theoretically have a plan and a picture of what we want to accomplish and where we want to be, the target is deliberate but the pathway is always evolving.

Businesses can provide a great example. You have companies that want to be leaders in their industries and so they develop a widely successful process or product and excel in the marketplace. The issue is that many established companies see change from that point on as a choice between the status quo and new marginal costs and revenues. They are already in a good place and they don't want to lose their position as a leader. There is a clear difference between that marginal cost versus the "full cost." There is an unseen cost of not innovating and changing. There is a cost to letting others bring new things to market. Small decisions can lead to big mistakes and without realizing the "full cost" of keeping the status quo, can lead to a major player being taken out of business or their industry altogether. Do you remember Kodak, IBM computers, or Blockbuster? Stay 100% committed to your goal but accept that change is inevitable.

When it comes to each of us individually, it makes us take a moment to ask, "Who do I want to become?" Do we consider all the facets of our lives? Family? Our core values? Our professional selves? Who we are as individuals? I want to be a man dedicated to helping improve the lives of others. I want to be genuinely kind, authentically honest, forgiving and selfless. I want to be a husband, a father, and a friend. A man that doesn't just believe in God but believes God. I want to be a facilitator who empowers people and educates them. Someone who motivates people to act. I want to be a traveler or an explorer. I want to be challenged and always striving to learn new things and improve.

You can always revisit and rewrite that likeness if you find yourself not liking what you're becoming. You can have a vision of what you want to become but that is your vision and your choice and that can change as well. The point is whatever you chose to become, be fully committed and devoted to it.

Finding The Right Metric

"I realized that, constrained by the capacities of our minds, we cannot always see the big picture.... We need to aggregate to help us see the big picture. This is far from an accurate way to measure things, but this is the best that we can do.

"Because of this implicit need for aggregation, we develop a sense of hierarchy: people who preside over more people are more important than people who are leaders of fewer people. A CEO is more important than a general manager of a business unit; that general manager is more important than the director of sales; and so on.

"Now let me explain in religious terms: I realized that God, in contrast to us, does not need the tools of statisticians or accountants. So far as I know, He has no organization charts, individual person in order to comprehend completely what is going on among humankind. His only measure of achievement is the individual.

"Somehow, after all of this, I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage - a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.

"This realization, which occurred nearly fifteen years ago, guided me every day to seek opportunities to help people in ways tailored to their individual circumstances. My happiness and my sense of worth has been immeasurably improved as a result."