MEASURING
LIFE

Knowing what’s bigger
than your career

BY Jayashantha Jayawardhana

French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote this eerily clever line: “Smooth and smiling faces everywhere but ruin in their eyes.” Going by what the press reports and what’s taught in business schools, this line serves to describe the lives of several corporate executives.

Though they appear to lead lives filled with decadent luxury that’s envied by many, such superficial metrics of outward success fail to capture the reality of their lives. Many businesspeople have no purpose in life than to accumulate wealth by hook or by crook.

They fail to heed their inner moral compass and end up practically shipwrecked – separated or divorced from their spouses, estranged from their children, ridiculed by society, and isolated from friends and family.

When the worst comes around, they end up on the wrong side of the law, become entangled in court battles that destroy their reputation and careers, and even end up in jail.

Consider how Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers ended up behind bars. They’re merely two high profile corporate criminals among the many less known businesspeople who are languishing in prison. There are also those who stopped short of prison but their lives are no less ruined.

How do such seemingly intelligent and even street smart corporate executives find themselves in such a mess?

This happens when they don’t have a solid purpose of life, a good moral compass and a well-defined value system. Apart from such failings, this occurs when they don’t know why they work, for what purpose, whom they live for and what truly matters in life.

In fact, regardless of where we’re in the corporate hierarchy, we need to have a clear purpose in our lives. We should have well-defined metrics to measure our lives.

Management thinker Peter Drucker wrote in his classic Harvard Business Review (HBR) article headlined ‘Managing Oneself’: “I was doing very well as a young investment banker in London in the mid-1930s and the work clearly fit my strengths. Yet, I did not see myself making a contribution as an asset manager.”

He added: “People, I realised, were what I valued and I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery. I had no money and no other job prospects. Despite the continuing Depression, I quit and it was the right thing to do. Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.”

Former Harvard academic and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma Prof. Clayton Christensen sheds light on this tricky subject in his 2010 HBR article titled ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

It’s tricky because as Christenson admitted, while Harvard Business School (HBS) draws the best business students from across the world annually, a substantial share of them pay scant thought to the purpose of their lives. This, he argued with compelling logic, could send them off in the wrong direction.

He wrote: “I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts because life only gets more demanding – you take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; [and] you have a spouse and children.”

And much like their companies, corporate executives too must have a strategy for their lives. An organisation’s strategy is shaped by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different to what management intended.

However, as the decision-making systems of businesses are designed to direct investments to initiatives that yield the most tangible and immediate returns, they may short-change investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

In business or life, the wiser course is to forego the almost natural temptation for instant gratification. Doing otherwise can be detrimental all round.

Once you resolve to act on this crucial insight, your vision will become clearer; and you’ll see where you should invest your personal time, energy and talent. Then you should have a strong moral compass that guides you along the right path. Remember that there are no extenuating circumstances for taking or giving bribes and all other violations of integrity.

And once you’ve defined the purpose of your life with clarity and strive for it, it will become more fulfilling and balanced. This way, you’ll be able to climb the corporate ladder without destroying your family. You will also realise that there’s no zero-sum game between career and family life, which many corporate executives wrongly believe to be true.

Remember, your life is bigger than your career!