*Last Read: Jan 2024* Author: Clayton Christensen ### The Book in 3 Sentences or Less How we can take business concepts and apply them to our personal lives and vise versa. ### Who should read it? Anyone looking to take business concepts and apply them to life. Examples include strategy, resource allocation, and how to find the right job. ### How the booked changed my thoughts? A lot of business practices can apply to family life. How we manage our time, how we build cultures, empathy for our spouse/customer. ### My top quotes - If you want to help other people, manager can be one of the most noble professions. You have the opportunity to frame each person's work so that at the end of the day they go home feeling fulfillment. - Everything is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage. - The root causes of business disasters are almost always because someone choose immediate gratification over the hard things that result in long-term success. - The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone who's happiness is worth devoting yourself to - Sacrifice deepens our commitment - Culture is the way of working together, toward a common goal that has been followed so frequently and successfully that people don't even think about doing things another way. ### Notes - The best way to predict the future isn't by collecting data. Data is only available for the past - this would be like driving forward while looking at the rearview mirror. Theories are valuable because they give you a framework for what could happen before you experience it. - Financial incentives are limited in their ability to entice someone to do something (idk about this) and true motivation is getting people to do something because they want to. - Hygiene factors: status, compensation, job security, working conditions, policy, management. These are the elements that if not done right cause dissatisfaction. They are the bare minimum for employee happiness. - The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn't satisfaction, it's the absence of dissatisfaction. - Motivating factors: challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. These are intrinsic conditions and what we should target as leaders. - If you want to help other people, manager can be one of the most noble professions. You have the opportunity to frame each person's work so that at the end of the day they go home feeling fulfillment. - Anticipated opportunities - the ones you see and choose to pursue. Pursuing them is deliberate strategy. - Unanticipated opportunities occur once a strategy is launched, and forming a strategy to pursue them is an emergent strategy. - Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and emergent strategy. The latter is used until you find out what really works, and then you flip from emergent to deliberate to execute. - To test which one to use we can use the "discovery-driven planning" process which involves asking the question - "what would have to be true for our assumptions to be correct?" - Too often, we don't send planners (investors) back to the drawing board to change their guesses or learn new information, but we motivate them to make the numbers look right. - Instead, ask teams to compile a list of assumptions that have been made in the initial projections and ask them..."which ones need to prove true for us to expect these numbers end up correct?" - You can talk about have a strategy for everything, but the only thing that matters is where you spend your time, money, and energy. That is your real strategy. Real strategy is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. - Everything is only intent until it gets to the resource allocation stage. - The root causes of business disasters are almost always because someone choose immediate gratification over the hard things that result in long-term success. - The danger of high performers is that they will ultimately and unconsciously allocate resources that yield immediate and tangible results - even when that's not the best thing to do long-term. - Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment, but its nothing compared to the enduring happiness of great relationships with your spouse and children. - Successful companies don't succeed because they nail the initial strategy and never change. They win because they have money leftover when the strategy stalls or fails. They can always try new approaches. - Be patient for growth and impatient for profit. - Big companies burn through money quickly - just like startups that raise too much. - The time to invest in the next wave of growth is at the apex of the current one. The new strategy / growth plan needs time to marinate and be unprofitable. - Too much capital frees up executives to pursue the wrong strategy aggressively. - Empathy applies to both relationships and customers. A deep understanding of what's actually important to them and not what we think is important or think they may want. - Sacrifice deepens our commitment. - Just like a great organization, the best tool we have to help our kids is building the right family culture. - Culture is the way of working together, toward a common goal that has been followed so frequently and successfully that people don't even think about doing things another way. - The advantage of this is that the organization eventually becomes self managing. - Culture, rather than managers, cause the right things to happen.