In 2012, Clay Christensen joined with James Alworth and Karen Dillon to write what I think of as one of the most important books out there called How Will You Measure Your Life. It was based on a the last class that he did at the Harvard Business School every single year. And in this conversation that you’re about to hear, Karen Dillon, Scott Anthony, another of Clay’s acolytes, and me got together and were interviewed by Victor Zhao and Martin Ekiti, co-presidents of the Parents@Harvard Chan School of Public Health to think about how we measure our lives and things that we take from that—to really make sure that we’re living in concert with purpose and the progress we seek to make and not drifting off course. I hope you enjoy the conversation that I’m bringing to you here that was recorded live on April 3rd.

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Victor

First, I’d like to quickly introduce ourselves and then just set up the backdrop for today’s conversation. Thank you everyone. My name is Victor. I’m one of the co leads of the Parents at Harvard Chan community which is the Parents club of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Along with my co moderator Martin we are really grateful to bring this conversation together. And this conversation is a part of the whole life Leadership speaker series, a Harvard affiliated series exploring one central question. What are the pivotal mindsets, habits and tools needed to succeed both at work and at home? At its core, the series is built on a simple belief that leadership is not compartmentalized.

Honoring Clayton Christensen’s legacy

Victor

How we show at work and how we set up at home are deeply connected. And today leaders we have a very special session. We are gathering to honor the legacy of Professor Clayton Christensen, whose work reshaped how the work understands innovation, but who also challenged us to think more deeply about something even more important, which is how we measure our lives. In his well known framework, Clay encouraged us to think about three key questions. How do we find meaning in our careers? How do we build enduring relationships? And how we live lives of integrity. And today we’re honored to be joined by three remarkable individuals, thinkers and leaders who have engaged deeply with Clay’s work and ideas and they will help us explore how these principles apply in real life. First, we have Scott Anthony. Scott is a Clinical professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and previously spent over two decades at Innosight, the forum co-founded by Clay Christensen, where he served as a global managing partner.

He’s a leading thinker on innovation and disruption, a Thinkers50 award winner and author of several influential books including Dual Transformation and the most recently, Epic Disruptions. Scott brings both deep intellectual and practical perspectives on how Clay’s idea have evolved and been applied over time. Next we have Karen Dillon. Karen is a co author of How Will You Measure Your Life based on Clay’s work and teaching and served as the editor of Harvard Business Review. She worked closely with Clay for over a decade and has been instrumental in translating his ideas into guidance for individuals navigating life leadership and well being. Her current work focuses on helping people understand how everyday decisions shape long term outcomes, including her recent book the Macro Stress Effect. And finally, we have Michael Horn. Michael is a co-founder of the Clay Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

He is a widely recognized author and thought leader in education and career development, including his recent new book, Job Moves. Michael’s work focuses on helping individuals build lives of meaning and fulfillment. He closely aligned with questions Clay challenged us to consider. And with that, we are very excited for you all to be here. Let’s dive into the conversation and Martin will open our conversation up with a question for all our panelists.

Martin

Thank you so much, Victor, for passing the baton to me. Well, I am personally very excited to be part of this conversation. We’re going to talk about a few things over the next few minutes. I know we had some technical issues in the beginning, but we’re going to divide the talk into different sections over the next, I don’t know, 40 minutes and then have some time at the end for Q and A. But before we go into some of the specific sections, I just want to ask all the panelists in general, when you hear the phrase whole life leadership, what does that mean to you personally? And how did your relationship with Clay Christensen’s work or personally shape that understanding for you? So Scott shows up first on my screen. So I’ll start with you, Scott.

Scott Anthony

All right, well, thank you very much. The last name of Anthony often gives me the first right of speaking in discussions like this, but it is a real privilege to be part of this discussion. Karen and Michael are longtime friends, although we’ve never, the three of us done something together. So this is a great opportunity. You know, Martin, when I hear whole life leadership, I really think of something that I teach my students at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. I start by reading poetry to them, which is a little weird to do in an MBA classroom, but I like to do slightly weird things. And I had the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I won’t recite it now because we all know it.

Finding balance in leadership

Scott Anthony

But the idea that a traveler stands in the yellow woods and he has these choices. I said, this is what life feels like to you, right? You have these either or choices where either I can do this or do that. I could focus on my work, or I could focus on my family, short term or long term, in Clay’s language, sustain or disrupt. I said, what you have to do as a leader is to recognize that these are false choices. And what you have to do is find ways to integrate things where you don’t make it either/or, but you make it both/and. And that, to me, is whole life leadership, where you’re not saying, I’m one way at work and another way at home, or I’m one way with this child and another way with that one.

You are one and the same throughout everything. And this, to me, the understanding, all started 26 years ago now when I was sitting in Clay Christensen’s classroom in Aldrich hall at the Harvard Business School, and he gave what I think was one of the first prototypes of the lecture that ultimately became the book How Will You Measure Your Life? And that idea of intentionality and integration, which we’ll continue to talk about through this discussion, really planted very firmly in my head at that moment. So that’s what I think about. And Clay was absolutely seminal in implanting that in me.

Martin

Thank you, Scott, for sharing that. I mean, one thing that you said that really stood out to me is you have to switch from the mindset of either or to a mindset of. And so, you know, after that, I’ll call on okay to go.

Karen Dillon

Well, I definitely agree with Scott. So you. I would have taken away the same lessons from Clay as well. But I think the idea that you bring your whole self to work and you bring your whole self home from work, and they’re really integrated. One of the things I used to love that Clay would talk about is management is a noble profession. Not just because, you know, what you do in the day with the people who report to you can be meaningful

And they can feel like they’ve had impact on the world, but the people that they go home to and go home to have a ripple effect on so many other people. And so you, as a manager or a leader, have the ability to sort of exponentially influence lives for the better. If people go home from work feeling fulfilled and feeling like they believe in the mission of what they’re doing, and they know their purpose at work, that person goes home and is a whole different person than the person who goes home and is grumpy and upset and unappreciated and doesn’t want to talk to the family or friends. So I just think the idea that you integrate, which is what Scott talked about, came for me too, is a powerful lesson from Clay that it is a noble profession. So taking leadership seriously beyond the walls of your organization, I think has a real impact.

Martin

Thank you so much, Karen, for sharing that. I mean, you said, just like you said leadership, being a manager is a noble profession. So it’s not something we should take for granted. It’s definitely something we should lean into intentionally. So thank you so much for sharing that. And Michael, by virtue of alphabetical order, you come last. Hopefully we’ll switch it up into previously next in some next questions. But thank you for sharing your, go ahead, please.

Life lessons from Clay Christensen

Michael Horn

I’m quite comfortable coming after Karen and Scott throughout all this, but I think you’ll hear a lot of similarities in some of our answers because we all sat literally at the feet of Clay, given how tall he was, and had these conversations with him over a number of years. But like Scott, I remember that last class where Clay gave a version of what of the talk that ultimately became How Will You Measure Your Life? And I remember running home and calling my mom actually up in Bethesda, Maryland, where Scott also grew up, coincidentally and literally reciting the whole thing to her and story that Karen just told around where he actually talked about when he was running a company that he took public and at the company picnic he saw this woman with her family there and how deeply all of a sudden this sort of washed over him, the realization that if she had a great day at work, she would go home and bring that joy and gratitude into the lives of her family. And if she had had a terrible day at work, been really beaten up, been, you know, yelled at by other people, whatever it was, she would bring sort of that pent up frustration and anger home as well. And just that ripple effect that these spheres of our lives that often we’re told to treat independently are not in fact independent of each other, that they’re quite inter-dependent and I would say in my book Job Moves, that was something that came out loud and clear. We studied literally thousands of individuals as they were switching jobs and what you see is that the decisions that they make where they say, you know, I’m not going to take the higher paying job that climbs the career ladder or whatever else that seemed like a mystery to some managers, it’s actually quite well explained when you realize, well, they had things that were going on in the rest of their lives, children, older parents, whatever it might have been, some sort of set of circumstances where they were making trade offs and these things were not independent of each other. They were quite interdependent. And I’d argue even more so today in a world where Zoom has made remote working more and more a reality for so many. And these questions of how we’re trading off our work and other parts of our lives increasingly are intermixed.

And we can argue whether that’s a good thing or bad thing thanks to technology, frankly invading much of our home lives with work. But the reality is they are much more integrated. And so living your life with that authenticity that Scott talked about, I think is incredibly important in all spheres. And treating all people as you want to be treated, really that golden rule in all parts of your life are incredibly important.

Martin

Thank you so much for sharing that, Michael. I mean, one thing that you said that definitely stood out for me is, you know, as managers, as leaders, there’s things going on in the lives of people that you’re leading that you’re not necessarily aware of. So we not only have to be empathetic towards that, we need to understand that those things are driving the choices, even though we don’t understand it. So thank you so much for sharing that. Now we’re going to go into the different sections where we’ll talk about one thing and then the other and probably ask you questions one after the other, probably different questions as well. I’ll pass it over to Victor to introduce section one and then he can ask the first question over to you, Victor.

Victor

Thank you, Martin. As we mentioned earlier about whole life leadership series, we have three focuses: what is the mindset? And then what are the habits? And then what are the tools or systems to help us succeed at home and at work? So first we’re going to focus on the mindset. So Karen, Clay often argued that strategy is shaped by how resources are allocated over time. How did the idea change the way you think about your own time, energy and attention?

Personal strategy vs daily choices

Karen Dillon

Well, the theory of resource allocation may sound very dry to people, but it’s a really powerful insight. It’s a very simple idea that no matter what a company says its strategy is, that strategy is actually formed. The reality of achieving or not achieving that strategy is formed in the everyday decisions and choices that employees make. People on the front lines, people all the way up and down the ranks about how to use company resources and their focus and their energy. And it’s one thing to say what your strategy is, it’s a whole different thing to live it in those everyday resource allocation decisions. And that insight, that simple theory that Clay and I talked about years ago in his office, was a total inflection point for me personally, because as he probably talked about it too, with both Scott and Michael in the class, years before that, you can apply that to your life in a really powerful way. And the idea is very simple that you can say what your strategy is, but your strategy is formed by the reality of the everyday decisions you make personally about how you’re going to focus and where you put your energy and what you prioritize over something else. And for me, when Clay said that, I was in my sort of early 40s and I had two young kids and I had a really big consuming career, and I knew that my personal resource allocation process did not match what I would tell you my life strategy was.

It was very different. And, and for many people like I, people like me, you sort of think you can sequence that. You can, you, you can fix it later. You can match your resource allocation process to your real strategy, your real priorities. You know, when, when I get this promotion, when I finish this project, when we move to the big house, whatever, whatever sequence thing comes in your life. But for me, it was really a kind of lightning bolt that I would have told you very clearly that my strategy, my personal strategy, was to have a fulfilling career, but also to be a great mom and a great daughter and a good spouse and a good friend. And I had part of that right. And the other part I really did not have right.

Reevaluating personal resource allocation

Karen Dillon

If you looked at my actual resource allocation over time, over a long period of time, the past month, the past six months, the past year, the past years, you would not say that my strategy was clearly being formed by that resource allocation to achieve what I said I wanted to achieve. And until you actually look at your personal resource allocation process and see if it matches what you want your strategy to be, you’re not going to achieve that strategy. It’s just as simple as that. Everyday decisions and choices and priorities will affect that outcome for you. So it’s a really powerful, simple insight that totally caused me to completely reexamine my own life and think about my own resource allocation process over the long term.

Victor

Yeah. Thank you, Karen. I totally agree that this resource allocation idea sounds simple, but it’s such a powerful mechanism that students are learning why we everyday people use it in their day to day in their personal life. So I really appreciate how Clay translate business strategy to life strategy.

Karen Dillon

To add one thing, one thing, I was going to give you a quick example of it. So in the business you think about the resource allocation might be which customer is more important than another, where will we cut a corner or not? They’re just simple choices that may not seem to in the moment make a big deal, but they can really be, again, an inflection point in the strategy of the company. We’re cutting corners here. We’re being a little shoddy there. This is more important than that. Those are simple choices. We do it all the time in our personal lives as well. I will make my friends and family a lower priority this week.

I’m not going to commit to meeting them for a walk or I’m not going to go to that family birthday party because we just think we’re making a small choice now and it won’t really play out in the long run. But again, every time you make a decision like that in your personal life, I’m not going to get home from work on time today or I am not going to focus on my children, my relationship with my children until school’s out or whatever you are, you’re then making resource allocation decisions that you don’t think about as being such a significant thing, but they are building, and forming your strategy with those every simple everyday decisions.

Martin

Thank you so much for adding that, Karen. So the next question I’ll ask to Scott. In Clay’s work on disruptive innovation, he warned that success can blind us to weak signals. How does that insight apply to leadership in life and family? Where do the costs of ignoring small signals and how can these compound quietly over time?

Scott Anthony

Well, the costs are monumental. So let’s start first with the Clay teaching and then I’ll quickly apply it to three different domains. So the things Clay would teach is there’s no data about the future. When you’re trying to make decisions about the future and you are trained to make data based decisions, those will take you backward, not forward. Because again, there’s no data about the future, which means you have to sense and then find a way to amplify what can be very weak signals of change. Now let me start with just physical. If you’re doing any kind of training, it’s obvious to you when there’s a sign of distress. So as a personal example, I’m doing something I’ve never done before.

I’m training to run in the Boston Marathon in just a couple weeks. I’m 51. This is a stretch and a push. I’m doing it for charity and all that. But when I am training too hard, I know my knee just tells me, all right, it is time to stop. There’s no ambiguity about it. I don’t argue with the knee. I just go and say, all right, that’s enough for today.

But when you’re inside an organization, you might have some low degree of emotional distress and say, you know, something doesn’t feel right about how business is going, but you don’t have the physical signal of your knee shooting paint at you so you can safely ignore it. Or, or find ways to avoid that distress by doing things like, well, maybe we should do another reorg or why don’t we hire a consulting company that’ll keep everybody busy or whatever. You can distract yourself from it. Or in your personal life, if your 14 year old, who’s outside that door right now because they’re off school Today, if your 14 year old is just not having that great a day, it might show up as something very small and subtle and you might say, Harry, go ahead, just play on your device and play geometry dash or whatever. While you’re ignoring that, underneath the surface, there’s a sign. Physically, you see it inside business leadership, you miss it. In our personal life, you can really miss it. And then years down the road, you’re a business leader, your business has gotten away from you, your kids have gone in directions that you’re not happy about.

So the trick in all of this is to say, when I sense there’s something going on, stop, pause, reflect, try and grab hold of it and use something to bring it into sharper context. One of the great teachings that Clay gave all of us is lenses. He gave us theories and models and frameworks so you could take that weak signal and make sense of it. It is, in my view, the most important general lesson that he taught. Because if not, you get yourself in trouble because you make a steady stream of incremental decisions that seem to make sense until you end up in the position you don’t want to be in. That’s the essence of the resource allocation process Karen talked about.

Martin

Thank you, Scott, for that. One of the reasons why I really like, you know, not only attending the sessions, but actually putting them together is I personally learned so much because you just gave an example about a 14 year old, and I have a 14 year old, right. And I’m looking forward to coming back from school today because for some odd reason, here we have school today, which makes no sense. But there’s, like you said, there’s always things going on beneath the surface. And unless you are intentional about seeking this out, they just pass you by and it’s one thing and then it goes into another thing and then before you know it, you look back and like, wait, what happened? But you know, you know, consciously, intentionally looking, seeking these things, you know, that’s what I hear you saying. And I definitely, I agree with you. That’s, that’s the way to go when you want to, you know, pivot in time, adjust in time so you’re not looking back and say, hey, where do we go? Going one degree off track for the past 50 miles. So, yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing that.

Victor

Next question for Michael. Question about purpose. Clay believed that motivation and meaning, not just talents, drive sustained performance in your work on talents, careers and education. How have you seen purpose shape people’s ability to thrive at work and at home?

Michael Horn

Well, I’ll ground us sort of how Clay came into it first and then talk about the application that I’ve seen in my work. But Clay believed everyone was motivated and that motivation was to make progress in their lives as they defined it. And this came from a theory that he developed with some folks, Bob Moesta and some others around jobs to be done. What job are you hiring someone to do in your life? And the observation he made was that a lot of times school, when you were enrolled in it or the job you were in, was actually fundamentally misaligned with progress as you were defining it at the moment. And so it wasn’t that we’ll stay with the 14 year old analogy for a moment, that they were, you know, that they were unmotivated and listless and whatever else, but they were motivated to feel, you know, success and have fun with friends or things like that. And the way school was set up was not, in fact helping them accomplish that. And so instead they were realizing success on that video game that Scott referenced or maybe on the playing fields, right? Or band performances, whatever it might be, they were able to have fun with friends and feel that sense of progress.

And then what you realize from that insight is, well, you really have to actually define what is, what does progress look like for me at this juncture and as I’m searching and so forth and making choices. So in college, for example, one of the big ahas from our book Choosing College that we did was that roughly almost half the population, when they enroll in college and they choose a school, they have no idea what that purpose is underlying. They make a decision that’s fundamentally inconsistent with what they’re trying to achieve in their lives. And they often do it because someone else expected them to enroll in college in general or that specific school that they did. And those expectations, it turns out, are a pretty lousy reason to enroll in school. And this may shock this audience at, you know, largely Harvard individuals, but the graduation rate from colleges in America is 60% in six years. So 40%, roughly, of students who go to college, do not graduate within six years.

And I will tell you, we make a lot of big deals about student debt and so forth in this country. Turns out generally, actually, that student debt is a good investment to get a college degree. But if you don’t graduate and you also incur debt, that’s the worst of all worlds. And it’s because they often go there without a clear sense of why am I enrolling, what is my purpose here? And when times get tough, as they always do when you’re studying, they could drop out, right? Because that actually seemed like a better way to get back on track in many cases. And the same thing is true in your job, right? We realized as you’re navigating your career. And what we’ve realized as we looked at it is we tried to understand why people made the choice that they did, what was progress for them at any given point. What we saw was that sometimes people work to figure out what is my purpose right there, it’s sort of a learning step, if you will, which is great.

Finding purpose

Michael Horn

It can be short term, it can, you know, sort of help you make progress, move to the next thing that is perhaps closer to what purpose is for you. Secondly, it might be, actually, I already know what my purpose is. And this is very consistent with the work that I’m doing here, is very consistent with the impact I want to have in the world or in my job and so forth. And that could be either sort of a larger, loftier mission, or frankly, just the sense that, like, the work that I do actually has meaning and moves the needle, if you will. You’d be surprised how many people work in jobs where they feel like I show up, and frankly, if I didn’t show up, no one would know the difference. And then the third thing that we often saw is that people work so that they can actually live out their purpose outside of the job, which is a great thing as well. You know, whether that’s in their communities, whether that’s with their home life, their family, the volunteer things that they choose to do work allows them to afford, if you will, the time to dedicate to those things. And I think where people go awry or struggle is not necessarily because of a talent mismatch, but frankly, when those purposes and progress don’t really line up with the choices that they’ve made.

And Viktor Frankl and many others have taught us about the centrality of purpose in the human experience and sort of being able to work through struggle and make progress. And when those things don’t line up, you actually see the rampant disengagement. I talked about the college dropout rates, but look, 2/3 of individuals in jobs today completely disengaged from work. And it’s no surprise because they really haven’t thought about or found jobs that tap into that sense of purpose. And likewise, frankly, on the job of colleges and employers or companies making sure, hey, am I hiring someone? Do I really understand why they’re here? And can I help them make progress toward what they’re trying to achieve as well?

Victor

Thank you, Michael. Yeah. Purpose is so important in any area of our life. As you were referencing different researchers, one additional author came to mind is Simon Sinek with his Start with Why. Start with why. You can push through innovation, you can push through challenges, difficulties. So, yeah, thank you for that. And now let’s shift gears to the second part of today’s discussion, the habits.

So Martin will kick us off with habits.

Martin

Yeah. So again, in this section two, we’ll be focusing on habits, basically what sustains alignment over time. Because it’s one thing to want something, to have the mindset to do it, but then you have to be able to, you know, move yourself to actually get the thing done. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this section. So I’d ask Karen to begin with, in the Micro Stress effect, you show how small chronic pressures erode well being. How does Clay’s work help explain why leaders with good intentions still manage to drift away from what matters most to them?

Karen Dillon

Well, I’ll just explain what microstress means because I think it relates to what Clay talked about as being most important. Microstress. From my research with Rob Cross, a professor, an expert on collaboration at Babson, are the frequent, really quick routine interactions that we have with other people that are so quick, but they’re so micro stressful in the moment that they cumulatively take a real physiological toll on you, meaning by the end of your day. So how many of us have fallen into bed exhausted but you can’t even actually remember what happened that day. It was a normal day, but I’m exhausted, I’m fried. That was probably a day full of microstress. All these interactions with people that are cumulative, taking a toll on you. And the reason that’s important to connect to Clay’s work is because one of the most powerful antidotes to dealing with microstress in our research from a really substantial group of high performers is having meaningful relationships and contacts with other people.

And what happens when your day is filled with microstress like that? You don’t have time or energy or emotional bandwidth for anything but responding and reacting to the stresses coming at you. And it could be anything from being mildly misaligned with a colleague to a stressful interaction with a family member you love. They happen in small doses all day long and take a real toll. So you’re too tired to do the things that we know are going to actually give you an injection of joy, in the short term and the long term. So for one, just responding and being on the back foot all day to this barrage of microstress, which feel too small and too stupid to complain about because individually they are small, but cumulatively they’re taking a real toll. And that toll includes not only your physical well being. It’s very bad for you physically to feel this day in and day out, but it’s playing a really negative role in your long term happiness because you are not making time for the things that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt are going to be the most meaningful investments of your life. The personal relationships in your life.

So allowing yourself, and we all do, to kind of juggle and just grit through it and deal with a day long, a week long, a month long of microstress, which we all do, is going to take a much bigger toll than you’re realizing in each of those individual moments.

Martin

Thank you so much for sharing that, Karen. I mean, it brings to mind for me personal experience. You know, sometimes we go out to work and then we know we go home, we have to meet a spouse. And sometimes you don’t want to say anything, but then if you don’t say anything, you don’t connect. Like you said, meaningful connections. Making these connections with people that you do love and who are there for you can de stress your life in general. So if you don’t, then the next day it could get worse, even though nothing worse actually happens. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Victor

And next question is for Scott. Clay emphasized that processes, not willpower, drive all costs. What habits or routines have you seen leaders adopt that protect relationships and values during intense professional seasons?

Scott Anthony:

Right. Well, let me again start by talking about how Clay would explain this. So he had a couple different stories that he would tell that generally related to his religious beliefs that led to him not working on Sunday. And there’s a famous story about a basketball tournament that he did not attend a final game for. There’s a famous story about a train departing from the BCG office at a certain time that he would always make sure he was on that train, which meant that was when he was going to stop working. That I remember back when I was his research associate after graduation, the other person who was doing research with me, we would just joke about the train, and that was our signal for, we’re done for the night. We’re just not doing any more work.

Finding balance in work and life

Scott Anthony

The idea here is you’ve got a decision rule that says, I am going to have a boundary condition. And Clay would say, once you said it, you have to stick to it 100% of the time. It’s actually easier, he would say, to stick to it 100% than 99%, because that 1% turns into 2, 5, 10, 20, and then you don’t have a decision rule. And I think about this personally, going back to what Karen was talking about, about resource allocation should say, I’d be out of balance for a week, month, six month period, et cetera. I think about things in quarterly periods. If you zoom in to any given moment, you cannot be in balance, because in a given moment, you’re doing a thing. So I’m here with all of you. I hear my kids behind the door there, but I am not with them.

If I zoom out and look at my entire life, you know, I work reasonably hard, a couple thousand hours a year. You do all the math. You’re working about 22% of your life. That’s kind of useless. But if you look at things over a quarterly basis, I can say, how many of the baseball games and shows and performances did I show up for? How many times was I there for family dinner? How many times was I able to take my kids to a baseball game or whatever? But over the course of a quarter, you could say, hey, in balance or out of balance. And then you can say, what adjustments do I need to make? So that idea of saying, I’m purposely seeking this and I’ve got a mechanism by which I’m going to check it can be a way to do it professionally. One thing that I learned from AG Lafley, who was the CEO of Procter and Gamble for a long period of time, is if you are serious about something and you’re serious about getting your organization to have something be a value that turns into a habit. It has to be first thing Monday morning, not last thing Friday afternoon.

Because last thing Friday afternoon. Those are the things that you get to Friday afternoon and the micro stresses that Karen talked about have ground you down to the point where you say, you know what, that can just wait until next week, month, quarter, year. Never gets done. If you say it is the most important thing. So I’m going to do it Monday morning, then you do it. One example, I lived in Singapore for about 12 years. I remember one time P&G’s board met in Singapore and I had breakfast with their head of R and D and I said, how you doing? He said, well, I’m a little tired, to be honest, because before we came to the board meeting, we all fanned out across different regions in Asia and all went to go and spend time with consumers in their home. It was a ritual that P and G did before any big meeting.

The top leaders would go out and live what AG Lafley was trying to promote. The idea that consumer is boss, the job they’re trying to get done is what we have to help them with. And if we don’t do it first, we’re never going to do it. So the idea of decision rules and having mechanisms to make sure you do it first, not last, those are the things that I think help to bring intentionality to the different things you’re trying to do.

Victor

I love that. Scott. I think that it’s very important for all of us, most of us on a call, our parents, to set that ritual, set that process so that we don’t rely on willpower, which can deteriorate as we go throughout the day, throughout the week. So thanks for that. And because of time, we’re going to jump to the third section, the tools and systems. How we can use those tools to help us design a life that holds. So again, back to you, Scott. Clay believed that bad outcomes are really the result of one bad decision, but many small ones compounded over time.

So what tools or systems help leaders avoid those kind of drift when trade offs are not obvious day to day,

Scott Anthony

I’ll try to be succinct just to make sure there’s plenty of time for the other panelists to have great things to say. I would summarize and simplify down to get outside voices in. So, you know, if you look at people who are elite athletes, the best in the world at their professions, none of them do it on their own. All of them have coaches, multiple coaches to help them be at the really top of their game. Yet somehow we think that our parenting, our business leadership and so on should be something that we do on our own. That’s crazy. Of course, if you’re in a relationship, you’ve got a partner, spouse, or whatever, that can help, but really, it does take a village. So make it collective and have people from the outside that can really hold you accountable professionally.

I have a kind of informal personal board of directors that I check in with repeatedly just to make sure that I’m not smoking my own exhaust fumes or whatever, and I’m really doing the things that I want to do. The outsiders can see things in a second that are not obvious to you. So make sure that you got outside voices that help. That, to me, is the most important thing.

Martin

Thanks for sharing, Scott. And I’ll just ask one, you know, ask Michael one other question and then we’ll probably open up the floor for Q and A from the audience if we don’t have any other structured question after that. But Michael, in your work on careers and education, what practical tools have you seen help people navigate transitions? That’s whether it be new roles, parenthood, reinvention, without losing momentum or meaning.

Clarity through outside insights

Michael Horn

Yeah, I think clarity around what is the progress I’m trying to make in this struggling moment is maybe the most important question to dive into when you’re making those transitions. And just to build on Scott’s point, I think having outside people that can ask you the questions to really surface what is that progress for you is actually maybe the most important thing because we’re often, we’re almost always unaware of what the job to be done is for ourselves. We sort of act in these subconscious ways, if you will. And so if you ask someone, you know, what are you trying to do, or why did you buy this particular product, or why did you make this resource allocation choice in your life or whatever else, you’re going to get an answer that’s either an outright lie or frankly masks the truth. But having outside people that can actually see the patterns, the choices that you’re in fact making and help bring those insights to life, I think is one of the most important things you can invest in to help clarify what does progress look like for me and then be able to adjust course in that quarterly look as Scott was saying. Just two quick examples of that. For me, my calendar is the biggest way I can control that. Right. So I frustrate a lot of people I work with.

But Thursday for me is a no meeting day for the most part. It’s a writing day because otherwise I don’t allocate time to it. In the course of the week, too many things bubble up, if you will, that just constantly compete for time and feel urgent, even if they’re not the most important thing. And then the second one, I’ll just tell you from the outside perspective, I could tell you a couple stories on this, but my wife and I, when we got married, actually we wrote our wedding vows and we wrote that a deliberate strategy to continue to invest in each other would be a critical part of the life that we were choosing to live. We looked out at Clay, obviously, when we both said that line and smiled at him. But the reason I say that is actually she and I will connect every so often and make sure I am still allocating the time that I need to to you and to the kids and making sure that we’re living that deliberate strategy that we wanted to. And she has full permission to call me on it when I have not successfully done it.

But that helps me figure out right in these points changes, these navigation. As you’re switching career, you’re switching a job or you’re adding a new gig or embarking on school, is this really actually carrying us toward where we are trying to go as a unit and we’re not going to drift apart from each other and the deliberate strategy that we’ve identified is so important to us. In addition to being Good Friday, it’s also Passover, which is a holiday that I celebrate. And there’s this concept in Judaism of Kadosh that you can make something holy by setting it apart. And so that’s how I see it really, is that she’s helping me set apart that relationship to make sure that we’re continually investing in it.

Victor

I love that. And thanks for sharing that story from your wedding. That’s amazing. And next, I would love to open up the floor to questions from our audience. We’d love to either start with, anyone want to unmute themselves or you can put your question in the chat. All right, go ahead. Lalith.

Pavni

Hey, first of all, thank you so much for this session. I’m Pavni and I’m sorry for not enabling my video. I’m putting my 8 year old to bed. It’s 9pm in India and hey Michael, so good to see you. Alam from hugsy here from 2025 life. But yeah, so much wisdom. I’m trying to still process both the books like I’ve read Job Moves and then How You Measure Your Life. I mean life changing books for me.

But one question is that, I mean, this is truly what I’ve been grappling with after I read the book when I was making my career choices, trying to change jobs and you know, make those decisions. Honestly, after Harvard, I feel that I’m in a privileged position to make those kind of decisions. Like how I would choose my time, allocate my time, where do I spend it? But before that, when I was working with the government, working 12 hours a day, I honestly felt that I didn’t have that privilege. So do you think I’ve been thinking about it, is there a play of power and privilege and does it mean that only when you get to a certain point in life you have the power to make these decisions and arrive at these mindsets or is it something that you can start very early in your life? I mean, I’m happy if any of the panelists could answer those questions, no preference here.

Michael Horn

I can give a quick lightning round answer and I suspect Scott and Karen have thought about this a lot as well. The one quick thing I would say is I think at any juncture of life, whether you have lots of income, little income, lots of power, if you will, in a society, or little, you’re always making trade offs between competing interests. And the question is, what are those trade offs you’re willing to make and what are the things you’re willing to say? I’m not going to invest my time in that today because, you know, of the circumstances in which I am. And so a lot of people, you know, have said to me, oh, you know, it’s, it’s all well and good to figure out your progress when you’re, you know, in a particular situation. But if I’m working three jobs and just, I need that paycheck, right, for these reasons, and even though there you’re still making trade offs around, okay, what amount of salary am I going to take and what is the trade off in other parts of my life? And so the trade offs may be different, but I guarantee you there’s no one at any part of our society that has a completely frictionless experience where they’re not making trade offs. And if they do, I would argue that they’re probably not particularly happy because I actually think life comes from working through these struggles. The purpose actually makes it worth the struggles, make it worth living, I guess is what I would say. That’s part of the fun of life.

Scott Anthony

And I just built out of what Michael would say, just a personal example. So after I graduated from undergraduate, I spent a couple years as a consultant at McKinsey and Company. And you know, it’s a big company then, even bigger company now, and I was a peon, the lowest of the low. But still there are opportunities to set decision rules. So one that I said is, I know this job, it demands a lot out of me and I’m here, I want to do it. However, I’m 21 years old, so at 5 o’ clock on Friday I’m turning off and going to a place where I can enjoy myself. Five o’ clock on Saturday, I’m doing the same thing. Do what you want the rest of the week.

But those are two things that I’m going to hold a sacrosanct. And I did. And then after the McKinsey experience, I said to myself, look, when you are a cog in a really big organization, there’s just limits to the degrees of freedom that you’re ever going to have. Which is one reason why the idea in 2003 of joining the very small team at Innosight was so attractive. There are downsides of being in a smaller organization, but there’s the ability then to be much more conscious and purposeful in your trade offs. And yes, it is absolutely true. There’s a lot of privilege behind the story, no doubt about it at all. But in those moments, the micro moment and the deciding what path I’m going to go on, there’s the ability to shape and have intentionality in it.

Karen Dillon

I think I just weigh in with one thing. I agree with what they both said completely. I know it does sometimes sound like, oh, easy for you. Again, easy for you to say. Maybe you’re in the financial position to do this. What I would say is the longer you wait to try to course correct or get that right or struggle with those trade offs, the harder it will be because they become baked into your life. So I made dramatic changes in my life in my 40s. Maybe I should have done that in my 20s so I didn’t have to do such a dramatic thing in my 40s to kind of really repurpose my whole life.

Making better daily choices

Karen Dillon

But I just would say all of us, every single one of us, make discretionary choices with our time every day. Yes, you have to do your job. Yes, you have to do whatever it is to put food on the table to maintain your everyday life. But I know deep down in our hearts, each of us knows the discretionary choice we made to scroll a few more minutes on the phone or sit in the car finishing a podcast. I’ve done that too and not go into the house quite yet, or not get around to doing something. We all have some ability to control the choices we make on a daily basis. And when you think about it that way, you can even make some small changes that will help you get to the trade offs that are going to make you happier in the long run, rather than waiting until you’re really far down your life where maybe you haven’t invested in the rest of your life in the right way.

You don’t have the relationships, you don’t have the friendships, you don’t have interests outside of work and family, which maybe is growing up. It’s really important investment to make all along your life, not waiting till someday when you’ll finally get to it.

Martin

And Karen, thank you so much for sharing that. I just mentioned something, you know, a question that came in earlier kind of like popped into my mind and I was like, I’d like to pick your brain on that and any other person on the panel can share. But you mentioned course correcting, right. So what would you say are some of the tools or some of the, you know, means you’ve used to recover when you do realize that your life is getting out of alignment?

Karen Dillon

So I’m going to tell you what I did, which I don’t recommend, but it worked out really well for me. I was actually the editor of Harvard Business Review at the time. When I first started working with Clay again in my mid-40s on what became the article How Will You Measure Your Life In Harvard Business Review and ultimately the book. And when he and I talked about resource allocation, that totally caused me to rethink my life. And I was really afraid that I was going to not know my own children very well when they went off in the world. My kids were about 8 and 9 at the time. And long story short, with a lot of thought and deliberation, I resigned as the editor of Harvard Business Review. And kind of with my husband, we rebuilt our life on different priorities.

Deciding personal commitments

Karen Dillon

I ended up doing lots of really wonderful work with Clay. So I didn’t stop working. I just worked differently. You don’t have to do that, but you do have to take the time to decide what are the commitments you’re making to yourself. Forget, in a way, pleasing everybody else in the world, we’re all probably better at trying to keep our commitments to other people. But what are the commitments you’re gonna make to yourself? And if you don’t make those commitments to yourself, Clay would say, you’re bobbing around in a sea like you’ll just go wherever the currents take you. And I think even taking the time to do that was a dramatic change in my life. What do I actually wanna commit to? I’ll tell you the single biggest change I made in my life.

Well, in addition to quitting my job, the everyday changes. I actually once wrote an article for Harvard Business Review called Confessions of an Unrepentant BlackBerry Addict. That was the time when blackberries were dominant and I thought it was the greatest tool ever. And I figured out a way I could sneakily put it on top of the television and I could see the light when an email came in. I could get up and check my email and nobody in my family would notice. When I realized the signal of my research allocation process to my family, I chose. I made the commitment to myself to be present with the people in my life.

So I’m looking you in the eye when I’m talking to you. And my phone I’m not trying to sneak and scroll, and I’m not just relaxing or just one more minute. That just changed my relationship with my kids in a really great way. They knew, like, I know my children now they’re in their 20s, but I know them well and they know me and they know that they matter to me. And I realized the signals I was sending by just the thing I thought I was very sneakily doing. It’s so simple.

But I think it’s a catalytic thing, and it doesn’t take a lot of different time. You can put that down, go look in the other room at the moment when you need to. But when you’re present with someone, be present with them.

Scott Anthony

If I could just quickly build on that. So we have a family device. We got the brick device, which some of you might have heard about, where you can essentially deactivate your phone for a period of time. And no family meals until you go and brick your phone so we can make sure that we’re all present. The other thing, Karen, you said, that really struck me, this idea of, say you did the big, bold thing, which is quit and start. So I joined Innosight in 2003, 2007, I announced I was going to leave. It took me 15 years before I actually did that.

For a variety of reasons. But you know, somewhere along the way I said, I want to do something different. It’s hard to go left, right, do something completely different. Herminia Ibarra, in the book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, has really good advice. She says, flirt with your future self. So go and find low risk experiments where you can go and try something out to see what it’s like. For me, I kind of had a sense I wanted to teach. It’s a big change to go from consulting to teaching.

But it’s easy to go and give a guest lecture or go and run a single seminar or run a webinar. And when you go and do one, you say, okay, I like this. I didn’t like that. The ability or the opportunity to run low risk experiments is a really good thing that can help you then say, all right, I now have enough data to suggest this is really what I want to do. And Herminia Ibarra’s stuff is really, really helpful on this topic.

Victor

I love that, being an innovator. I think big part of it is have the design thinking hat empathize with different scenarios, possibilities. Anyone else have any questions? We have three minutes left. We’d love to address more questions.

Scott Anthony

So, yeah, but there have been a couple other tools have been put in the chat. But Andrew’s question I thought was a juicy one.

Martin

You guys worked with Clay a lot. What would you think Clay would have thought about AI and how it relates and how it relates to the questions posed, and how will you measure your life?

Michael Horn

Who wants to go first?

Scott Anthony

I do have an answer to it, so it’s not fair to ask, but I’ll give a short answer again. You know, so in How Will You Measure Your Life, I talked about the Ship of Theseus paradox, the idea that you bring a boat into harbor, you remove piece by piece, and ultimately, is it still the Ship of Theseus? And he used that as a metaphor for if you’re outsourcing the development of your children to lots of different places, are they still your children? I think he would use the same thing to talk about artificial intelligence. There’s an emerging framework from a few academies that there’s a few different archetypes of how you use artificial intelligence. There’s cyborg, where you fuse the AI into what you do. There’s a centaur, the body of a horse, the head of a human. You divide the tasks. And there’s the chauffeur. I’m just going to get in the back and let AI take me anywhere.

When you do that, you have lost something really important. And that’s what I see a lot of our students doing. They say it’s so easy just to do that. I say, well, you’re never going to learn how to drive if you never take the wheel. And I think Clay would ponder the ship of Theseus paradox and AI. There’s a lot more he would say about it. But that one thing I think really struck me with your question. Great question.

Michael Horn

Karen, you want to jump in or

Karen Dillon

I’ll just. I’ll disagree with that. Basically. I do think that one of the chapters of the book is about the schools of experience that help you become the professional you want to become, and probably personally as well. And I do think that’s the struggle. AI obviously, is an amazing tool. It has lots of good applications, and I am a fan of AI in some.

Some places. But what Scott said, what are you missing? When you’re not going through the struggle to make sense of something or to learn something or to have a setback and figure out your path forward, but AI is solving it for you. You’re not getting those critical thinking skills. And I think that can be very powerful. And there are all kinds of moral implications in How Will I Stay out of Jail? The last chapter of the last section of How Will You Measure Life from AI that I think we as a society still have to struggle with.

Michael Horn

Andrew, I would say, obviously Julia Freeland Fisher, who you know well, has been writing a lot about. Right. The dangers of outsourcing your friendships and relationships to AI. I’ll go a slightly different direction, which is, I think from a jobs to be done perspective. We talk about any job having functional, emotional and social dimensions to it. I suspect we’re going to be using AI a lot for the functional ones. I think the mistakes we will make are when we outsource the emotional and social aspects of those struggles to AI and we don’t get.

Look, AI has built itself on a couple dimensions of the human experience, largely language and sight. It has not done huge swaths of what makes us human. And that’s how we connect with each other, which sends unbelievable feedback loops of positivity to us that we don’t even still understand the full mechanisms of. If we’re avoiding that, I think that gets into what Scott was saying as well.

Victor

Yeah, I love that. Michael, what you just said reminded me of the longest running study on happiness. A Harvard study of adult development. They find that the strong positive relationships are the primary driver of lifelong health and happiness more than anything else. So I think in the age of AI and especially what we’re talking about today, relationships with family, with kids, with spouse is so important. With that, I love to conclude our conversation. Thank again, so, so much to Michael, Karen, Scott for jumping in and super excited for the dialogue that will continue after the conversation. And so thank you so much, everyone.

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