37 pages • 1 hour read
Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen DillonHow Will You Measure Your Life?
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Clayton M. Christensen
Clayton M. Christensen is the primary author of How Will You Measure Your Life? He was assisted by James Allworth and Karen Dillon because at the time of writing, he suffered an ischemic stroke and partially lost the ability to speak and write. Christensen was a graduate of Harvard and returned to teach there. He begins the book by discussing some interactions with his students and claims he never imagined himself working in academia. He shares his career path when discussing the differences between deliberate and emergent strategy.
Christensen’s personal values inform much of the book, in addition to his intellect and experience. In many ways, the book itself is an intellectual exercise in which he applies business theories to life and relationships. Furthermore, his advice is also value based. Christensen speaks openly about his faith, and toward the end of the book, he digs deeper into how this faith guided him, especially during his college years in Oxford. Overall, he voices the importance of determining one’s purpose, with his own comprising being kind, generous, and devout. In terms of measuring his achievement of his purpose, he says, “[T]he only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people” (203).
Verda Christensen
Verda Christensen is Clayton M. Christensen’s mother, whom he discusses to illustrate the value of responsibility and self-reliance. Verda never mended his clothes, and since his family lacked money when he was a child, mending these clothes was a necessity. She showed Christensen how to sew the holes in his clothes and then left him to do so himself. Christensen believes such moments “helped [him] to learn that [he] should solve [his] own problems whenever possible; they gave [him] the confidence that [he] could solve [his] own problems; and they helped [him] experience pride in that achievement” (135-36). This sense of accomplishment remained with him as an adult, as the most effective way to teach children to appreciate the value of work is to give them opportunities to try, fail, and try again.
Jeffrey Skilling
Jeffrey Skilling was the CEO of Enron during the company’s scandal-turned-bankruptcy, which led to the loss of retirement savings for its employees. Skilling used deceitful tactics to misrepresent the company’s debt to shareholders and was sentenced to federal prison in 2006. Christensen discusses Skilling early in the book, mentioning that he graduated from Harvard with Skilling. He claims that the man who would become a criminal was not so in school: “The Jeffrey Skilling I knew of from our years at HBS was a good man. He was smart, he worked hard, he loved his family” (3). Christensen uses Skilling’s story as a cautionary tale, suggesting that one should never lose sight of what truly matters in life.
Nolan Archibald
Now retired, Nolan Archibald was at one point “the youngest-ever CEO of a Fortune 500 company—Black & Decker” (148). Christensen uses Archibald’s rise to the top to laud the value of adversity. He describes some of Archibald’s early decisions as “unconventional”—including operating an asbestos mine in Quebec, as “he thought that particular experience, of managing and leading people in difficult conditions, would be important to have mastered on his route to the C-suite” (149). Archibald had a clear goal when he left business school—becoming a CEO—and rather than strengthen his resume, he sought experiences that would directly help him as a CEO. These experiences were hands-on instead of theoretical, preparing him for his future career.
Nick Leeson
Nick Leeson, a former trader “who famously brought down British merchant bank Barings in 1995 after racking up $1.3 billion in trading losses,” was sentenced to “six and a half years in a Singapore prison” (187). Leeson’s actions resulted in the loss of nearly 1,200 jobs, which included the jobs of friends (187). To Christensen, Leeson did not start out with a malicious intent to deceive and destroy the company. Instead, it likely began with his decision to cover up a mistake that eventually spiraled. Christensen uses Leeson’s story to illustrate marginal cost thinking, framing Leeson’s cover-up as the easy way out. Instead of making the difficult decision to own up to his mistake, Leeson compounded his problems—which ultimately cost him his freedom and marriage.
