The Weekly: Edition #30 - January 31, 2020
The measure of your life
Clayton Christensen, long-time Harvard Business School professor, family man, and author of The Innovator's Dilemma, passed away last week at the age of 67 after a long battle against leukemia. In 2010, he wrote a piece titled How Will You Measure Your Life and penned his own answers to the three key questions he posed to his business students over the years:
- How will you ensure that you will be happy in your career?
- How will you ensure that relationships with family become an enduring source of happiness?
- How will you ensure that you stay out of jail?
All individuals must reckon with their purpose, work-life balance, and personal responsibility at some point in their lives.
These questions also apply to business owners as well. How do you as an owner or operator, ensure that your employees answer these in the affirmative? Do your employees find a sense of purpose in their work? Do they enjoy meaningful relationships outside of work? Do they conduct business in an ethical manner?
As a business owner or operator, you must wrestle with how to create a culture that promotes positive employee answers to these questions. Collectively, your employee's candid answers represent your company's culture.
Purpose, work-life balance, and ethics. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that these three areas are the most important areas for young prospective employees today. Creating a winning, self-sustaining culture begins with how you articulate your business's values for new hires, how you reaffirm them for current employees, and how you lead by example:
"Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently."
First, Purpose and Happiness. Businesses can't ensure employees are always happy but can ensure that they are motivated by opportunities for growth in responsibility and through deserved recognition:
"One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—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."
Is your company dedicated to a specific space or cause? Don't be shy about it. Be crystal clear with prospective hires:
"Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces."
Next, Work-Life Balance. This concept may be controversial depending on the industry, but at the end of the day, you can't sprint a marathon. Every moment an employee spends overworking results in additional fatigue and stress that eventually takes its toll on relationships outside of work. As an employer, you have a choice: encourage balance, or attempt to sprint the marathon that is life.
"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."
Finally, Ethics. The question, says Christensen, often elicits laughter. But some of the smartest classmates of his - e.g. Jeffrey Skilling of Enron - started out as 'good guys.' So where did they go wrong? They cut the small corners first:
"If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification."
And once they chose to cut corners, their discipline grew weaker and weaker:
"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."
Purpose, Balance, and Ethics combine together to illustrate the true measure of a person's life. Christensen sums up beautifully that the measure of your life is not found in external success, but in the amount of lives positively impacted:
"Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people."
The woman shaking up the diamond industry (The New Yorker)
+ "Lahri, who is small and voluble, with a bright, forthright manner, is a trailblazer: a head-scarf-wearing Muslim executive in a majority-Christian country, and the first Botswanan woman ever to manage a diamond mine."
Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes (Wired)
+ This is an indepth inside look at the popular movie review site and its history.
These tailors have proven that custom suits are no longer just for men (Fortune)
+ For decades, the tailored suit was a man's territory. But a trend of business professional tailors catering strictly to women is winning over the other side of the aisle.
Why do private equity firms keep wrecking retail chains - three theories (Slate)
+ Overleverage, dividend recapitalizations, and disrupted industries don't seem to mix well. Remember, selling your company involves far more than the highest bidder.
Why nearly 20% of young consumers didn't read local business reviews in 2019 (Bright Local)
+ "One could certainly make the argument that the lack of trust expressed in the previous chart strongly suggests that this is just a very distrusting generation, perhaps battle-hardened by scrapes on social media, and that the number of fake reviews online hasn’t grown significantly, but by pretty much all accounts, fake reviews are indeed a growing problem."
Mondelez looks to streaming as a new frontier for marketing efforts (WARC)
+ Streaming is quickly becoming the new 'TV' advertising medium for big brands.
A structured approach to strategic decisions (MIT Sloan)
+ "Given how unreliable human judgment is, all evaluations are susceptible to errors. These errors can stem from known cognitive biases — or they can be random errors, sometimes called “noise.” Unreliability in judgment has long been recognized and studied, particularly in the context of decision-making about hiring."
2020 Edelman trust barometer report (Edelman)
+ "People today grant their trust based on two distinct attributes: competence (delivering on promises) and ethical behavior (doing the right thing and working to improve society). This year’s Trust Barometer reveals that none of the four institutions is seen as both competent and ethical. Business ranks highest in competence, holding a massive 54-point edge over government as an institution that is good at what it does (64 percent vs. 10 percent). NGOs lead on ethical behavior over government (a 31-point gap) and business (a 25-point gap). Government and media are perceived as both incompetent and unethical."
Chinese city plans to build coronavirus hospital in days (The Guardian)
+ "The Chinese city of Wuhan, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, has begun the ambitious task of building a 1,000-bed hospital in just 10 days to treat victims of the epidemic."
The recycling of ships (Dr. Nikos Mikelis)
+ Dr. Nikos Mikelis presents a snapshot of global ship recycling and the economics behind the industry.
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