Christensen’s latest
work was co-written with James Allworth, a student of his at Harvard and Karen
Dillon, editor of the Harvard Business Review and I heard about the book from
the Businessweek piece “Clay Christensen’s Life Lessons” by Bradford Wieners.
The book is a blend of
business and life lessons (with many covering both areas) and has a number of
interesting points made throughout.
The first part of the
book is more business focused and an initial idea put forth is Christensen espousing frameworks, how to think and solve problems rather than more narrowly
focusing on what to think or the solution to any one quandary. Related to this is his
view of job satisfaction being driven by both hygiene and motivation factors.
The first factor contains often very necessary things like money, but not
necessarily the motivating things that would cause someone to excel.
Looking a bit past
just the individual to include a company view as well, Christensen notes the
importance of assumptions in pursuing a goal (again, either for a person or a
business), specifically the question of what
has to prove true for a plan or approach to have the results you seek?
In the next section,
the book focuses more specifically on individuals and their relationships. To
this end, the peril of sequencing is brought up, specifically being willing to
push aside important life or relationship investments now with the belief that
you’ll get to them later. It’s noted that this approach will often result in
important moments simply passing someone by. An example of sorts is given with
the story of babies and language. Christensen writes of language dancing, adults carrying on real conversation with an
infant and how the frequency of this interaction and sheer volume of words
exposed to can have a large impact in the mental development of a child.
Another idea that
stood out from this portion of the book is one that could be taken as a
business lesson, but perhaps has more impact in relation to personal
relationships. The question of what job
does something serve? is brought up and Christensen then covers some
interesting and important points on the subject. He writes that "the two fundamental jobs that children need
to do are to feel successful and to have friends- every day" and then
encourages the reader to “think about what jobs your spouse is looking to you
to do” and follows that up with the idea of seeking not to find a mate who will
make you happy, but one whose happiness would be important enough that
the investment of time and energy to make that happen would be worthwhile to
you.
The next idea of note
from the book was also one that could be about either work or family and
covered the danger of outsourcing important things (whether tasks for companies
or personal development for children). Along with this was covered the
importance of capabilities and how they’re made up of (A) resources, (B) processes
and (C) priorities… basically what, how
and why. If parents are always on
with their kids, they’ll help them develop good processes (goes back to the how to think framework noted earlier)
and hopefully take on the priorities both spoken of and that they themselves
model for their children. It’s a fairly obvious point, but certainly an important
one Christensen makes around setting examples all the time with the idea that "children
will learn when they're ready to learn, not when we're ready to teach them."
Through this example
setting and lesson teaching can come the right processes and priorities,
including things like determination and kindness (there’s a nice anecdote from
Christensen about teaching his kids that their family should be known for
kindness) and collaboration with others. Very much related to all of this was
an excellent quote made around children (but, frankly, would apply to anyone) with
“self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to
do." Last thing covered in
the book is yet another idea that would apply at both a business or individual
level and that’s the importance of a defined purpose, one that’s comprised of
(A) a likeness or end goal, (B) a commitment to pursuing that and (C) metrics
to measure progress against the goal.
All in all, I thought
it a very solid book with excellent ideas both around businesses and individuals.
