How Will You Measure Your Life?

It’s a question that more than philosophers should be asking, and Clayton Christensen’s new book confronts it in an atypical manner. After reading his brief tome, whose title is the question, I immediately bought copies for each of my adult children and additionally decided its ideas merited comment in this week’s blog.

Christensen comes out of my professional field, i.e. the field of business and technology. I first learned of him when I read his book, The Innovator’s Solution, about eight years ago. I was so intrigued with the concept of “disruptive technology,” which is what he called it, that I read the prequel, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the sequel, What’s Next?

Leaving my office one day this past spring, I heard Christensen being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt about his newest book, How Will You Measure Your Life? So, in deference to the Christensen “brand,” I bought and read it one evening.

Christensen begins by relating the experience of his Harvard Business School reunions. (I should mention that Harvard University, like me, does not believe business is an area of study for undergraduates; its well-known curriculum awards only Master degrees and doctorates.) Every five years, a reunion would reunite the members of a graduating class, and like most school reunions, the first ones are the best attended. Those are the years during which graduates are early in their careers, learning their trade, making their mark in companies, marrying, and having children.

But as years passed, later reunions saw fewer of Christensen’s aging classmates. Many stopped coming, embarrassed by the dissimilar trajectories of their professional and personal lives. Among those who continued to attend were a striking number with unhappy personal lives despite enviable success in their professional lives. Some attended with a second or third spouse. One hadn’t spoken to his children in three years and lived on the opposite coast from them. A classmate had been caught up in an insider trading scandal that became the subject of the book, Den of Thieves. Another was in jail for an illicit sexual affair with a teenager who had worked on his political campaign. He was married and had three children. Still another, perhaps the most notorious of Christensen’s classmates, Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron, is serving time in a federal prison for cooking his company’s books, and had suffered the loss of his youngest child, 20-year old John Skilling, who took his life in an overdose after breaking up with a girlfriend.

Skilling, Christensen recalled, was a good man. He was smart, worked hard, and loved his family. He had been the youngest partner at McKinsey, the well-known business consulting firm, and Skilling had been paid $100 million as CEO of Enron. Yet he had divorced and remarried, engaged in illegal activity, and watched his life unravel. Something had sent him off in a different direction than the man Christensen knew.

Why, Christensen asked? People don’t leave school intent on engaging in activity that will result in divorce, estrangement from their children, or being sent to jail. Yet something happened in the choices some of his classmates made that sent their lives veering off in unintended but nevertheless self-determined directions.

For sure, unexpected encounters with “things that go bump in the night” happen in all of our lives, and Christensen is no exception. A diabetic most of his life, he suffered in the span of three years a heart attack, follicular lymphoma – the type of cancer that killed his father – and a stroke that resulted in expressive aphasia, causing him to have to relearn how to speak. Despite chance collisions with unplanned and often unhappy events, our lives are nevertheless forged by our choices. As the ghost of Jacob Marley related his life to Scrooge in Dickens’ tale of Christmas, "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it,” Marley said. 

Christensen, now a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent the last day of class for many semesters by asking students to turn the theories they had been studying during their academic careers on themselves and predict what outcomes will occur if their own lives were the object of study. A good theory, after all, is characterized by its ability to predict. If theories predict likely business outcomes (businesses don’t really exhibit behavior; they exhibit the collective behavior of their managers) then wouldn’t those same theories predict the outcomes of behaviors in individual personal lives?

The students were asked to apply their knowledge to answer three questions. First, would their theories predict if they would be happy in their careers? Second, would their theories determine if their relationships with their spouse and family would become an enduring source of happiness? And third, can their theories predict with certainty that they would avoid jail or prison time? The last question reflected Christensen’s own experience with members of his graduation class.

In 2010, Christensen was asked to speak to not just his own class but to the entire graduating body. He was to summarize what he and his students had learned from focusing their business theories on themselves. Standing on the podium, made bald by his chemotherapy treatments, Christensen spoke about the things that were most important in life – not just when faced with life-threatening events as he was that day – but day after day during which time life is being forged “link by link, yard by yard” as Marley’s ghost had described. He spoke of life’s purpose, of setting boundaries on behavior, and of money versus family. The lecture has become one of the most popular published by Harvard.

In the audience that day was James Allworth, a student of Christensen’s, and Karen Dillon, the editor of the Harvard Business Review. Both were moved by Christensen’s comments though they came from different generations and perspectives of life. He later asked them to help him make his views available to a broader audience, and the book, How Will You Measure Your Life, is the result of their collective endeavor made even more difficult by Christensen’s later speech-impairing stroke.

I’m not going to summarize the book. Instead, I will give you a flavor of it in the remaining paragraphs of this blog so you can read it for yourself if its message appeals to you.

So let’s get started.

Pick up almost any survey of work satisfaction and it’s surprising how many people are engaged in jobs that aren’t fulfilling to them. The youthful hope to do something that would change the world – or the little part of it in which they labored – remained unrequited for many. If the truth be known, work for a majority of people becomes something they do to allow them to do what they really want to do. Sometime in the early years of their work careers many people make compromises that they intend to be temporary – accepting less than the type of work they prefer because its income, for example, would allow repayment of student loans. Once the loans were repaid, they intended to take a job doing the work they really love – or so they said. Or people may accept jobs because the income allows them to marry and buy a big house, or to get the kids in the best schools, or (fill in the blank for yourself.) But one day they wake up and find the maintenance of their current life style won’t allow them to pursue the work they love without major financial sacrifices. They find themselves trapped and the road back to their dreams grows harder and harder. And as the years go by and their dreams fade, they convince themselves that what they hoped to do as their life’s calling was the unrealistic expectation of their younger selves when they didn’t know how the real world operated.

What a tragedy! Most of us will work for 45 years, if not more, spending a third of every day during those years engaged in activity that for too many does not lift the spirit. “Do a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” the saying goes. Yet many will never find the work they love. And as a consequence they will look forward to retirement as a prisoner looks forward to the day when his sentence has been served.

How does this happen? Could the students of Professor Christensen apply their theoretical knowledge to predict whether they would find fulfilling and well-spent careers?

The answer can be found in the work of the late psychologist Frederick Herzberg, which was standard fare for understanding motivation when I was a graduate student. Job satisfaction is commonly believed to lie on a continuum which ranges from delight to misery. In fact, Herzburg’s research brought him to understand that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not on the same continuum but rather on different ones. Thus, he alternately called his theory the Two Factor Theory or Motivation-Hygiene Theory.

This is how Herzburg’s theory works.

If we were to observe the way the attributes of work influence our job satisfaction, we would eventually conclude that two factors were in play – one group of influences we could call satisfiers or motivators and another group we could call dissatisfiers or hygiene factors. Herzberg preferred avoiding the use of the term “demotivators” because it implied it was the opposite of “motivation” which it isn’t. In the sense that the word is used by Herzberg, “hygiene” has nothing to do with personal cleanliness. It is a description of the work environment – both the physical environment and psychological/emotional environment in which we work.

The reason that Herzberg used the term “hygiene” factors was that a workplace can be “cleaned up” by a company’s managers in the sense that no longer are there present any dissatisfiers like stupid work rules, low pay, insensitive management practices, or impossible performance expectations, to name a few. But it is important to understand that a “hygienic” workplace does not cause motivated work to occur. In other words, because motivators and hygiene factors are two different types of influencers, the removal of dissatisfiers does not cause satisfaction and motivation to magically appear. One set – dissatisfying hygiene factors – must be removed by managers. Another set – motivators – must be consciously put in their place by managers.

Common hygiene factors are pay, status, rank and its trappings, the workplace environment, job security, and the quality of supervision – things that can make you unhappy but whose absence are incapable of producing lasting happiness. On the other hand, motivators are attributes of the work itself – e.g. how challenging is the work, recognition received for doing it, opportunities it creates to allow one to grow as a person, and the preparation for additional responsibility the work provides. These are things that enrich the work we do.

A common delusion is that pay is a motivator or incentive. It is not. Mismanaged pay practices will cause unhappiness and fair pay practices will eliminate unhappiness. But money cannot cause a person to be happy in a bad job. Pay is perhaps the most important hygiene factor in that a pay raise will produce a temporary lift, but I can assure you that a person in an uninspiring job will feel just as deprived making $100,000 annually as she once felt when making $75,000.

The reason that Christensen and all of us see people who are unhappy in their work lives is that people often take jobs or make career decisions based on hygiene factors rather than motivation factors. This was the point Christensen was trying to get his students to understand by applying Herzberg’s theory to themselves. The theory doesn’t say that hygiene factors are unimportant. But a job that reeks in hygiene factors and no motivators will be a bad job to perform.

A case in point. When I was in graduate school, I recall a story one of my professors told our class to which I’ve only found one online reference as I write this blog. I believe I have the essential facts correct. During the Great Depression a psychology researcher hired a group of men to dig a hole. Upon completing it, they were told to fill it up. After that they were told to dig out the hole again and then again told to fill it up. Despite being fairly paid in desperate economic times, the men quit after three days exasperated at the meaningless of the work. Pay is a hygiene factor. Purpose is a motivator.

I recall when I was a young engineer the things that were most attractive to me were pay, title, the size and location of my offices (windows were always a key status symbol), if I had (versus shared) a secretary, even the number of buttons on my phone. These were all highly visible hygiene factors. I doubt that in my 20s and perhaps early 30s I could have been persuaded to stop chasing hygiene factors and look instead for meaningful work – until I ran headlong into a couple of jobs that paid well and had lots of status symbols, but I hated the work and eventually quit. Only by personal experience did I learn, as the researcher and the hole diggers proved, nothing can compensate for having to perform a bad job.

Why do people join the armed services, subject themselves to unending training, put themselves in harm’s way – all for relatively little pay and often not a lot of appreciation from the countrymen they are protecting? Why do people join aid organizations that deliver help to corners of the world which are hostile and uncooperative? Why work in a non-profit organization which pays little, or teach children whose parents often won’t attend meetings for the benefit of their children and whose budgets often require teachers to buy school room supplies and teaching aids out of their meager paycheck? The answer is passion. Passion! These people don’t have bad jobs. They have hard jobs, jobs done under difficult and challenging circumstances, jobs that are missing a considerable number of hygiene factors, but they are good jobs for those that hold them and are dedicated to do the jobs well.

We often chase pay and prestige in the jobs we are seduced to take, thinking that lifestyle will make us happy because it will make the world think well of us – perhaps even envy us. We later learn that we’ve made the wrong choice when we start counting the time remaining until we can retire and do what we want. How much more important it is to spend life doing work we love regardless of its pay and ignoring what the world thinks of it. “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness,” the Scot essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote 170 years ago. Sage advice. Too often ignored.

Christensen continues his book with additional examples of how business theories work in private life. He presents the theories of Professor Henry Mintzberg – devoted to deliberate versus emergent business strategies – showing how they apply equally well for managing the twists and turns of one’s career strategy. Christensen introduces the theories of capital investment and explains the theoretical foundation for outsourcing work in order to lead his students to an understanding of the second question he asked them: how to be assured of enduring family intimacy. And the third question – how to stay out of jail – can be answered by fully understanding the theory of marginal thinking, which comes from microeconomics, and its limitations.

The associations of academic theory to life’s outcomes are not contrived. A good theory does indeed predict, as you will see if you decide to read the book How Will You Measure Your Life?

This is a book I wish I’d read at a much younger age. More important, I hope I would have been capable of understanding it.