What Is Life All About? Using Business Strategy to Find Your Life’s
Purpose
By Eric Barker http://time.com/3071111/what-is-life-all-about-using-business-strategy-to-find-your-lifes-purpose/
If you’re anything like me, your answer is probably
something along the lines of “I have no idea.” And just being asked that question makes you feel
inadequate. Like you’re always supposed to know what the future will hold.
In
his powerful book, How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clayton Christensen reflects
that so many of his students at Harvard Business School feel they should always
be able to answer “What is life all about?” They expect to have their whole
lives mapped out — and if they don’t, something is wrong with them.
Starting as early as high school, they think that to
be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they
want to do with their lives. Underlying this belief is the implicit assumption
that they should risk deviating from their vision only if things go horribly
wrong.
Christensen
points out a fundamental irony: these business students don’t realize that most
businesses, well-planned as they may be, don’t really know what they want to be
either.
A full 93% of all companies start out doing one
thing and abandon that strategy because it wasn’t viable.
Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that
ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy— because
the original plan proved not to be viable. In other words, successful
companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning;
but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy
fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach.
Most companies have two forms of strategy:
deliberate and emergent.
·
Deliberate
is what’s in the business plan, the
PowerPoint Deck, the list of goals. And that’s what ends up changing 93% of the
time.
·
Emergent
is what you find along the way. It’s
when your baby nephew ignores the gift you bought him… but LOVES the shiny
wrapping paper. The heart medication research… that ends up
becoming Viagra. It’s unintended.
Your life is always a balance of
deliberate and emergent — what you plan, and what pops up through chance.
So how do
you know when to stick to the plan and when to change course with what comes
along?
If your deliberate plan is paying
your bills and you find it fulfilling, stay on the path. Pay less attention to the little things that pop up
and double down on present course.
If you have found an outlet in your career that provides
both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach
makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear, and you know from your present
experience that they are worth striving for. Rather than worrying about adjusting to unexpected opportunities, your
frame of mind should be focused on how best to achieve the goals you have
deliberately set.
But what about when you’re not
feeling fulfilled? Or when you have a dream but it’s not paying the bills and
offering a lifestyle? When you really have no clue to “What is life all about?”
Christensen says this is like those 93% of companies — they
need to experiment, to look around to see how to pivot.
You need to be trying to new
things, to iterate. To realize that maybe the shiny wrapping paper is better
than that gift.
But if you haven’t reached the
point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company
finding its way, you need to be emergent. This
is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in
life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep
going through this process until your strategy begins to click.
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of
deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where
your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out
what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to
a deliberate one.
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