HOW ABOUT MEASURING YOUR LIFE THIS SUMMER?

Guest blog from Anne Charbonneau, our Managing Partner in Amsterdam

What if you took the best models for success from business and applied them to your personal life?

This is what Clayton Christensen (Mr  “Innovator's Dilemna”) does in his latest little book called “How Will You Measure Your Life?”.

Here are a couple of ideas from the book that may give you something nice to chew over this summer:

1.Resource allocation: where the “rubber” of strategy meets the road

Christensen mentions that strategy of course means nothing until you have aligned how you will spend your time, money, and energy to that strategy. In fact, the strategy, for a company or for your life, is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how to spend those 3 things.

Christensen brings out some examples in the book from Unilever and Apple to show how things like staff incentives can actually work against a strategy. And then comes the bit about your private life and the trade-offs we make between time invested at work versus at home, between short-term work rewards verus long-term, and sometimes less tangible, “pay back” from family relationship and child raising.

2. The “Greek tragedy of outsourcing” – Don't outsource your future

Christensen tells the great story of how a small Taiwan-based supplier of circuits slowly ate away the business of Dell computers, by gaining competences until finally launching their own brand of computer.

The Dell story was a nice balance sheet in the short term, but longer term "leakage" of less visible capabilities, what he calls processes, (what we call the “how?”), ie. the way in which employees actually transform those resources, make decisions, coordinate, allocate those resources etc..

He warns companies to not outsource their future capabilities and to be super clear on what capabilities should stay in-house, so that you don’t hand over your business to your business partners.

Now on the juicy, bit, what does “Greek tragedy of outsourcing” means for your family life?

The morale is is that we should watch out not to ‘cart our children around to low-engagement theater classes or Chinese workshop (the business equivalent of over-flooding with resources – knowledge, skills and experiences) but instead WE should help them build capabilities and processes to help them succeed and deal with simple daily life issues, like mending stuff or building a shed.

Inspiring stuff to take with you this summer on the boat, the beach or the farm….