How Will You Measure Your Life? Reflections on Clayton Christensen

Ben Baran (0:00)

Welcome to The Indigo Podcast, an exploration of human flourishing at work and beyond. I'm Ben Barron of Indigo Anchor and Cleveland State University.

Chris Everett (0:09)

And I'm Chris Everett of Indigo Anchor. For more information, please visit us at www.indigopodcast.com.

Ben Baran (0:22)

Today's episode reflects on Clayton Christensen. And this guy was a Harvard Business School professor, he was a consultant.

And many of you probably know about him because of his book, The Innovator's Dilemma, which came out in 1997 That book introduced his theory of disruptive innovation. Well, Christensen died on January 23rd, 2020 And we were thinking about this and it reminded us of one of our favorite works of his. And our favorite work is not actually The Innovator's Dilemma, although that's really great and it was very influential. But we were thinking in particular about a 2010 article that published in Harvard Business Review titled How Will You Measure Your Life? He also wrote a book of the same title and you can find out all about him, his life and his work on his website, which is claytonchristensen.com and we'll post a link to that in the show notes. So today we're talking about how will you measure your life?

So what are we going to talk about today, Chris?

Chris Everett (1:21)

Yeah, so Ben, in this episode, we're going to talk about what does it mean to create a strategy for your life?

We're going to talk about ethics and integrity matter because people remember, you know, we all remember the people in our lives that lack that integrity and choosing your metrics for success. So how are you going to measure your success? And all of this applies to everyone, regardless of your career, what you do. If you happen to be in business, we think these topics are of special relevance and are super important to remember. But Ben, there was a quote in that article that both resonated with you. Why don't you go ahead and read that now?

Ben Baran (2:01)

Sure. So in this article, How Will You Measure Your Life, Christensen wrote, Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement and contribute to the success of a team.

More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That's unfortunate. Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

End quote. I just think that's such an amazing way to think about things. And it really resonates with how I think about leadership and management. I know it resonates with how you view leadership and management, and really even the work that we do with companies.

Chris Everett (2:49)

You know, when you're out in the business environment, either with our consulting clients, our executives that we coach, in the military, all those places, some of the biggest times in my life have been when people have taken the time to develop me. Right. But one of the things I see in all those environments is people are focused on get to work, do the job, try to get the promotion. So Bill or Nancy doesn't get it. You know, how do I drive this result, have this report? And it's no wonder that that's the case, because generally that's how, you know, performance reviews and how managers view this guy gets results.

But the main part of this life, in my view, is actually building up other people, you know, having individuals at all levels of the organization. It doesn't have to be leadership or managers that build each other up. That can be both encouragement, but also having something in your life, skills, knowledge, abilities and like integrity in a way in which you live your life that adds to the lives around you.

Ben Baran (4:01)

And I think it's just important to pause and think about these questions that we're going to raise today in the episode earlier rather than later. You know, these are questions that sometimes I think arise towards the end of people's careers, maybe once people retire.

And, you know, it's great to be thinking about these at any stage, but I think it's particularly important when you're, perhaps, earlier on or mid-career because you can make some course corrections. And these types of ways of thinking and these types of questions that we're going to talk about today oftentimes can influence your decision making about what types of jobs to take or perhaps even more prevalent, like how you're going to behave within your current role. So let's start off with this first part, which is what does it mean to create a strategy for your life?