How Will You Measure Your Life?

How do you find a job in which you are successful and happy? How do you achieve lasting close ties with your family and close friends? And how do you live a life of integrity?

Clayton M. Christensen, economics professor at Harvard Business School and author of the best-selling book Innovator's Dilemma, offers his personal guidelines as answers to these questions.

A few examples:

• In your professional life, don't focus primarily on "hygiene factors" such as money, power, and fame, but rather on "motivational factors" such as autonomy and fulfillment of meaning.
• Consciously plan a long-term career strategy only after a sufficient orientation phase. Question the strategy regularly and adjust it when unforeseen opportunities arise.
• For your strategy to be effective, make the myriad daily decisions about how to use your resources (money, time, and energy) in accordance with the strategy.
• Maintain and deepen relationships with family and close friends – at all times – not just when you need help.
• Spend as much time as possible with your children because they learn not when you want to teach them but in moments when they are ready. The more you are with them in those moments, the more they learn from you and not from others. And the more they adopt your values, too.
• Don't keep your children from failures, and don't solve their problems for them. Instead, teach them how to solve the problems themselves and deal with failure. With these experiences, they will better cope in adult life when much more is at stake.

For each guiding principle, the author provides exciting anecdotes from his life and startling parallels to the business world. This makes this inspiring book very enjoyable and entertaining to read. If the above guidelines appeal to you, then the book is certainly something for you.

Suitable as an audiobook? Yes.