How Will You Measure Your Life?. Clayton Christensen
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bets based on those predictions. Being right is almost directly correlated with making money; it is the confirmation that they are doing their jobs well, the measure they use to compete on. Similarly, salespeople feel success by being able to convince customers that the product or service they’re selling will help those customers in their lives. Again, money directly correlates with success—a sale. It’s an indicator for how well they’re doing their jobs. It’s not that some of us are fundamentally different beasts—we might find different things meaningful or enjoyable—but the theory still works the same way for everyone. If you get motivators at work, Herzberg’s theory suggests, you’re going to love your job—even if you’re not making piles of money. You’re going to be motivated.
Motivation Matters in Places You Might Not Expect
When you really understand what motivates people, it becomes illuminating in all kinds of situations—not just in people’s careers. My two oldest children taught me an important dimension of Herzberg’s theory on motivation. When we bought our first house, I saw a place in the backyard that would be perfect for building a kids’ playhouse. Matthew and Ann were the perfect ages for this kind of activity, and we threw our hearts into this project. We spent weeks selecting the lumber, picking the shingles for the house, working our way up through the platform, the sides, the roof. I’d get the nails most of the way in and let them deliver the finishing blows. It took longer that way, of course, figuring out whose turn it was for every stroke of the hammer and cut of the saw. It was fun, however, to see their feelings of pride. When their friends came to play, the first thing my children would do was take them into the backyard and show them the progress. And when I came home, their first question was when could we get back to work.
But after it was finished, I rarely saw the children in it. The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.
It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful. I shudder to think that I almost bought a kit from which I could have quickly assembled the playhouse myself.
If You Find a Job You Love …
The theory of motivation—along with its description of the roles that incentives and hygiene factors will play—has given me better understanding of how people become successful and happy in their careers. I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators, too.
The second realization I had is that the pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career—yet the siren song of riches has confused and confounded some of the best in our society. In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.
This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. But sometimes the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators. In my assessment, it is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. You must be careful not to confuse correlation with causality in assessing the happiness we can find in different jobs.
Thankfully, however, these motivators are stable across professions and over time—giving us a sense of “true north” against which we can recalibrate the trajectories of our careers. We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.
For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy. Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office. They are, after all, what our friends and family see as signs that we have “made it” professionally. But as soon as you find yourself focusing on the tangible aspects of your job, you are at risk of becoming like some of my classmates, chasing a mirage. The next pay raise, you think, will be the one that finally makes you happy. It’s a hopeless quest.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
CHAPTER THREE
The Balance of Calculation and Serendipity
Understanding what makes us tick is a critical step on the path to fulfillment. But that’s only half the battle. You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors. If it were that easy, however, wouldn’t each of us already have done that? Rarely is it so simple. You have to balance the pursuit of aspirations and goals with taking advantage of unanticipated opportunities. Managing this part of the strategy process is often the difference between success and failure for companies; it’s true for our careers, too.
Honda Takes America … by Accident
Back in the 1960s, Honda’s management decided to try to gain a toehold in the U.S. motorcycle market, which had historically been dominated by a small number of powerhouse motorcycle brands such as Harley-Davidson and some European imports, like Triumph. They strategized that by making motorcycles comparable to those made by these competitors, and selling them at significantly lower prices (at the time, Japanese labor was very inexpensive), they ought to be able to steal away 10 percent of the motorcycle import market from the Europeans.
Doing so almost killed Honda. In the first few years, it sold very few bikes—compared to a Harley, a Honda seemed like a poor man’s motorcycle. Worse, Honda discovered that its bikes leaked oil when subjected to the long drives at high speeds that were typical in America. This was a real problem; Honda’s dealers in America did not have the capability to repair such complicated problems and Honda had to spend what precious few resources it had in America to air-freight these faulty motorcycles back to Japan to fix them. In spite of the problems, Honda persisted with its original strategy—even as it was draining the U.S. division of virtually all its cash.
In addition to the large bikes it sold, Honda had initially shipped a few of its smaller motorcycles to Los Angeles; but no one really expected American customers to buy them. Known as the Super Cub, these bikes were used in Japan primarily for urban deliveries to shops along narrow roads that were crowded with people, cars, and bicycles. They were very different from the big motorcycles American enthusiasts valued. As Honda’s resources in Los Angeles got tighter and tighter, it began to allow its employees to use the Super Cubs to run errands around the city.
One Saturday, a member of Honda’s team took his Super Cub into the hills west of Los Angeles to ride up and down through the dirt. He really enjoyed it. In the twists and turns