How will you measure your life? Don't reserve your best business thinking for your career. By Clayton M Christensen

1. how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
2. how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
3. how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.

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.

—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?— concerns how strategy is defined and implemented.

Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies

• keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
• For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it.
• I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

• how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?
• Allocate Your Resources
• Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.
• I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on.
• Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad.
• People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

• Create a Culture
• being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
• Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.
• The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results.
• When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how.
• If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
• Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake
• The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails.
• Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.
• The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

• Remember the Importance of Humility
• humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others
• Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
• Choose the Right Yardstick
• I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research;
• I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched
• Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved;
• worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
• Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.