How will you measure your life?

Here I wish to share a small yet important section of the book How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon. This book has received rave reviews in terms of touching the heart of the matter i.e. how to lead a life in today’s growing complex scenarios.

Earlier book of Prof. Clayton The Innovator’s Dilemma is a classic book on how disruption can cause trouble to well established institutions. This book is an extension of lecture given by Prof. Clayton. Here I wish to share what I liked the most in the book and which is very valid and pertinent today. This is Resources, Process and Priorities.

One has to read the book to understand many other insights provided by the authors.

Difference between Resources and Process

“Take a young man sitting in class. Teachers and Scholars can create knowledge, and our young man can sit in class and passively absorb the knowledge that others have created. That knowledge now becomes a resource for him; he might use it to get a better score on a test that simply measures how much information he has acquired. But it doesn’t necessarily mean he has acquired the ability to create new knowledge. If he were able to take the information he absorbed in class and use it to, say, create an application for a tablet computer, like an iPad, or conduct his own scientific experiment – that capability is a process.” (Page 129-130)

Difference between Resources, Process and Priorities

“Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.” (Page 130)

Engaging the kids in endless extracurricular activities to see that they are busy or engaged

“Are the children developing from the experiences the deep, important processes such as team work, entrepreneurship, and learning the value of preparation? Or are they just going along for the ride? When we so heavily focus on providing our children with resources, we need to ask ourselves a new set of questions: Has my child developed the skill to develop better skills? The knowledge to develop deeper knowledge? The experience to learn from his experiences? These are the critical differences between resources and processes in our children’s minds and hearts – and, I fear, the un anticipated residual of outsourcing.” (Page 132-133)

On un-employment among young men

“I worry that an entire generation has reached adulthood without the capabilities –particularly the processes- that translate into employment. We have outsourced the work from our homes, and we’ve allowed the vacuum to be filled with activities that don’t challenge or engage our kids. By sheltering children from the problems that arise in life, we have inadvertently denied this generation the ability to develop the processes and priorities it needs to succeed.” (Page 134)