How Will You Measure Your Life? looks at real-life business cases and provides key insights into living
The book looks at real-life business cases and provides key insights into living.
Clayton M. Christensen
HarperCollins
Pages: 221
Price: Rs 399
Harvard Business School is perhaps the world's most powerful and intellectually stimulating playground for the mind. Almost every professor who taught me there was a true guru in his discipline. What sets Clayton M. Christensen apart even among these gurus is not just that he is in the 0.0001 per cent - that is, one in a million - of the finest minds of the world, but more importantly he would rank in the top 0.0001 per cent of any collection of individuals, anywhere in the world. A devout Mormon, a Rhodes scholar, with the finest values that God could have invested in any of his creations, he has a fine mind, which has produced a seminal, path-breaking book.
What sets apart and makes How Will You Measure Your Life? deeply engrossing is that it juxtaposes the business, academic and personal experiences of the author in a seamless tapestry to produce rich and practical insights for the reader, across both life and the art of living.
In other words, the book looks at real-life business cases and provides key insights into living. For example, Clay contrasts the strategies of Blockbuster and Netflix to explain what he calls the difference between "marginal thinking" and "full thinking". He calls Blockbuster's approach to evaluating alternative investments 'the trap of marginal thinking' - Blockbuster ignored its sunk and fixed costs and looked only at marginal costs. This mindset biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they need in the future. Since the future is unlikely to be just the same as the past, this simply will not work. Likewise in life, the past can at best be a rough indicator but never an exact roadmap for the unknown future where everything - including the variables and the factors that affect the variables - changes, often at different dynamics and speeds.
Clay, whose The Innovator's Dilemma can be counted among the best management tomes of the last two decades, uses frameworks he has formulated using his research over the years - research which has been powering organisations such as Intel, the US Defense Department and TCS over the years. He sets forth arguments that will be of immense help to both individuals and companies.
He explores the fundamental questions of human integrity, happiness, success and failure, family and relationships and teaches how to think through tough problems of life. In a superb chapter titled The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity, he explains how Honda, once a nonentity in the motorbikes sector, emerged from the shadows to conquer the American market, even besting market leader Harley-Davidson. He argues that in life too, many a time, it is often emergent strategy, and not deliberate strategy, that leads people to fulfilment and meaning. He gives examples from his own life, of how he wanted to become the editor of The Wall Street Journal but never got there - though today he is one of the newspaper's most valued contributors - then went on to do a start-up that did not take off quite as planned, after which he landed up in academia to become one the of the superstar professors ever. Clay has also fought a rare form of cancer and a stroke with fortitude and determination.
(The reviewer is an IAS officer. Views are personal)
