Does your family come out on top?

~ Live & Learn

From Clay Christensen’s Life Lessons, Bloomberg Businessweek. By Bradford Wieners

"…How Will You Measure Your Life? is sharpest on staying motivated in your career and, above all, on parenting…To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they do. The same logic applies to one’s life. For example, ambitious people will reliably tell you that family, or being a mother or father, is the most important thing in their lives. Yet when pressed to choose between racing home to deal with a chaotic pre-bedtime scene and staying another hour at the office to solve a problem, they will usually keep working. It’s these small everyday decisions that reveal if you’re following a path to being the best possible spouse and parent. If your family matters to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family come out on top?"

  • “…Clayton Christensen is a 60-year Harvard Business School professor and the celebrated author of The Innovator’s Dilemma…
  • …Since Dilemma was published in 1997, Christensen has…secured his reputation as one of academia’s biggest brains. Last November, for whatever these lists are worth, he topped the Thinkers50 index compiled every two years by the British consultancy CrainerDearlove,which declared him “the most influential business thinker on earth right now.”
  • …Over the years, he noticed that many of his former classmates at Harvard and Oxford, where Christensen was a Rhodes Scholar, had ended up deeply unhappy. “Something had gone wrong for some of them along the way: their personal relationships had begun to deteriorate, even as their professional prospects blossomed,” he writes in the prologue of his new book,How Will You Measure Your Life? Many of these folks stopped attending reunions, and Christensen sensed that they “felt embarrassed to explain to their friends the contrast in the trajectories of their personal and professional lives.”
  • …The book encapsulates Christensen’s best advice to keep high achievers from being disrupted in their own lives."

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20 thoughts on “Does your family come out on top?”

  8. Many of us worried about you and it’s great to see you’ve found the answer. Now for the feedback you gave me many years ago – do I have to give you the list of excuses so you can circle the right one? 🙂 . Now you know I paid attention in your class. All kidding aside it does hit home so thanks for sharing .

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  9. I gave up working full-time as a psychiatric nurse when my daughter was four, as she had bad asthma and her health was deteriorating with me lugging her backwards and forwards to the childminder at all hours. It also interfered with her ability to stay focused, as she was very hyperactive. My son never had to put up with me going out to work, as I did odds and ends from home. Of the two children, he is the more settled, the highest achiever, steadier in his relationships, and in better health.

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