The following contains excerpts from the book, How Will You Measure Your Life? (Clayton M. Christensen).
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we believe that music participation is an activity that enriches anyone’s life.
The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, has given much thought to the values that guide our personal lives as well as those that guide our businesses. Noticing, from his own experience, highly talented and motivated people from his own graduating class becoming very successful in business, yet profoundly failing in their own personal lives, initiated the author’s development of several ‘theories’ to apply and predict success or failure in both business and life.
Resource Allocation
“You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life…but ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road…Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.”
“The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources…We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
“The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers…promotion, a raise, or a bonus – rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families…The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me we help students to understand that whatever you sacrifice towards is what will yield results. This, however, should never be at the expense of life-priorities and relationships.
Finding Happiness in Your Relationships
“High-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work – and far too little on the person they want to be at home…You have to make sure that you allocate your resources in a way that is consistent with your priorities. You have to make sure that your own measures of success are aligned with your most important concern…Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment – but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.”
“Almost paradoxically…the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me, we encourage family involvement with the students from parents. This is a powerful combination, when students, parents, and teachers are all looking toward the same goals.
“Todd Risley and Betty Hart studied the effects of how parents talk to a child during the first two and a half years of life…The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life…when parents engaged in face-to-face conversation with the child- speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be part of a chatty, grown-up conversation- the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interaction they called ‘language dancing’…talking to the child about ‘what if,’ and ‘do you remember,’ and ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ – questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening around him…many more of the synaptic pathways in the child’s brain are exercised and refined…children who have been exposed to extra talk have an almost incalculable cognitive advantage.”
“If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”
What Job Are You Being Hired For?
One of the biggest failures in business is the company’s unwillingness or incapacity to understand what the consumer wants. “What is missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve…Changing your perspective is a powerful way to deepen your relationships.”
Meeting the customer’s need to help them ‘get a job done.’ is highly motivating to them.
The ‘job to be done’ theory is a “what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us…The mechanism that causes us to buy a product is ‘I have a job I need to get done, and this is going to help me do it.’”
“If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn’t intuitively map in customers’ minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed – unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.”
“If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous…Understanding the job requires the critical ingredients of intuition and empathy.”
“The jobs your spouse is trying to do are often very different from the jobs that you think she should want to do. Ironically, it is for this reason that many unhappy marriages are often built upon selflessness. But the selflessness is based on the partners giving each other things that they want to give, and which they have decided that their partner ought to want.”
We encourage a mindset of empathy in students at our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me, helping them to intuitively understand the desires of the community or audience they are serving.
Theory of Capabilities
To understand your capabilities, there are three factors: resources, processes, and priorities.
Capabilities: people, equipment, technology, etc.
Processes: will work regardless of who performs it.
Priorities: defines how a company makes decisions
The bigger the company gets, “Managers can’t be there to watch over every decision…that’s why the larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to ensure employees make, by themselves, prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. It means that successful senior executives need to spend a lot of time articulating clear, consistent priorities that are broadly understood throughout the organization.”
At our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me our goal is to help students achieve a level of maturity in which they develop their own autonomy as musicians and artists, in which they set their own course and continue the learning process.
“The theory of capabilities gives companies the framework to determine when outsourcing makes sense, and when it does not. There are two important considerations. First, you must take a dynamic view of your suppliers’ capabilities. Assume that they can and will change…focus on what they are striving to be able to do in the future. Second, and most critical of all: figure out what capabilities you will need to succeed in the future. These must stay in-house – otherwise, you are handing over the future of your business. Understanding the power and importance of capabilities can make the difference between a good CEO and a mediocre one.”
As parents, we need to ask, “Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences? These are the critical differences between resources and processes in our children’s minds and hearts.”
“Too few reach adulthood having been given the opportunity to shoulder onerous responsibility and solve complicated problems for themselves and for others…self-esteem comes from achieving something important when it’s hard to do…By sheltering children form the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.”
“Denying children the opportunity to develop their processes is not the only way outsourcing has damaged their capabilities, either. There is something far more important at risk when we outsource too much of our lives: our values…When children are ready to learn, we need to be there. And second, we need to be found displaying through our actions, the priorities and values that we want our children to learn.”
“We have created a void in our children’s lives that often gets filled with activities in which we are not involved. And as a result, when our children are ready to learn, it is often people whom we do not know or respect who are going to be there…if your children gain their priorities and values from other people…whose children are they?”
“One of the CEOs I have most admired, Nolan Archibald…CEO of a fortune 500 company – Black & Decker…instead of setting out on what most people thought would be the ‘right,’ prestigious stepping-stone jobs to get there, he asked himself: ‘What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”
“People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart.”
It is our desire, at our Odessa Texas Music School Near Me to prepare students to be able to face challenges head-on, by helping them develop core capabilities and conditioning on a very comprehensive level that gives them the tools they will need to make confident and competent decisions.