From “How Will You Measure Your Life?” by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon
To maximize the value of the advice in this book, you must have a purpose in your life… A useful statement of purpose for a company needs three parts. The first is what I call a “likeness”. By analogy, a master painter often will create a pencil likeness that he has seen in his mind, before he attempts to create it in oils. A likeness of a company is what the key leaders and employees want the enterprise to have become at the end of the path that they are on. The word “likeness” is important here, because it isn’t something that employees will excitedly “discover” that the company has become at some point in the future. Rather, the likeless is what the managers and employees hope they will have actually built when the reach each critical milestone in their journey.
Second, for a purpose to be useful, employees and executives need to have a deep “commitment” – almost a conversion – to the likeness they are trying to create…
The third part of a company’s purpose is one or a few “metrics” by which managers and employees can measure their progress…
These three parts – likeness, commitment, and metrics – comprise a company’s purpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued. When that is in place, however, then how the company gets there is typically emergent – as opportunities and challenges emerge and are pursued.
The same is true for leaders outside of the business sphere, too. People who have led movements for change, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama, have had an extraordinarily clear sense of purpose. So, too, have social organizations that have fought to make the world a better place…
But the world did not “deliver” a cogent and rewarding purpose to them. And, unfortunately, it won’t “deliver” one to you, either. The type of person you want to become – what the purpose of your life is – is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed. The opportunities and challenges in your life that allow you to become that person will, by their very nature, be emergent.
I have a deep respect for the emergent process by which strategy coalesces – and as a consequence, how I have pursued my purpose has evolved, step by step. Sometimes unanticipated crises and opportunities have felt like a wind at my back as I have worked toward my purpose. At other times they have felt like a numbing wind in my face. I’m glad that I wasn’t too rigid in how I could achieve my purpose.
I have tried to define the purpose of my life, and I have helped quite a few friends and former students do this for themselves. Understanding the three parts composing the purpose of my life – a likeness, a commitment, and a metric – is the most reliable way I know of to define for yourself what your purpose is, and to live it in your life every day.