There are probably dozens of well-intended people who have advice for how you should live your life, make your career choices, or make yourself happy. Similarly, walk into the self-help section of any bookstore and youâll be overwhelmed with scores of choices about how you can improve your life. You know, intuitively, that all these books canât be right. But how can you tell them apart? How do you know what is good adviceâand what is bad?
The Difference Between What to Think and How to Think
There are no easy answers to lifeâs challenges. The quest to find happiness and meaning in life is not new. Humans have been pondering the reason for our existence for thousands of years.
What is new, however, is how some modern thinkers address the problem. A bevy of so-called experts simply offer the answers. Itâs not a surprise that these answers are very appealing to some. They take hard problemsâones that people can go through an entire life without ever resolvingâand offer a quick fix.
That is not what I intend with this book. There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life. But I can offer you tools that Iâll call theories in this book, which will help you make good choices, appropriate to the circumstances of your life.
I learned about the power of this approach in 1997, before I published my first book, The Innovatorâs Dilemma. I got a call from Andy Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had heard of one of my early academic papers about disruptive innovation, and asked me to come to Santa Clara to explain my research and tell him and his top team what it implied for Intel. A young professor, I excitedly flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Andy say, âLook, stuff has happened. We have only ten minutes for you. Tell us what your research means for Intel, so we can get on with things.â
I responded, âAndy, I canât, because I know very little about Intel. The only thing I can do is to explain the theory first; then we can look at the company through the lens that the theory offers.â I then showed him a diagram of my theory of disruption. I explained that disruption happens when a competitor enters a market with a low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior. But the new competitor uses technology and its business model to continually improve its offering until it is good enough to satisfy what customers need. Ten minutes into my explanation, Andy interrupted impatiently: âLook, Iâve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.â
I said, âAndy, I still canât. I need to describe how this process worked its way through a very different industry, so you can visualize how it works.â I told the story of the steel-mill industry, in which Nucor and other steel mini-mills disrupted the integrated steel-mill giants. The mini-mills began by attacking at the lowest end of the marketâsteel reinforcing bar, or rebarâand then step by step moved up toward the high end, to make sheet steelâeventually driving all but one of the traditional steel mills into bankruptcy.
When I finished the mini-mill story, Andy said, âI get it. What it means for Intel is âŠâ and then went on to articulate what would become the companyâs strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the lower-priced Celeron processor.
Iâve thought about that exchange a million times since. If I had tried to tell Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, he would have eviscerated my argument. Heâs forgotten more than I will ever know about his business.
But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.
I Donât Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion
That meeting with Andy changed the way I answer questions. When people ask me something, I now rarely answer directly. Instead, I run the question through a theory in my own mind, so I know what the theory says is likely to be the result of one course of action, compared to another. Iâll then explain how it applies to their question. To be sure they understand it, Iâll describe to them how the process in the model worked its way through an industry or situation different from their own, to help them visualize how it works. People, typically, then say, âOkay, I get it.â Theyâll then answer their question with more insight than I could possibly have.
A good theory doesnât change its mind: it doesnât apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why. To illustrate, about a year after meeting with Andy Grove, I received a call from William Cohen, thenâsecretary of defense in the Clinton administration. He told me heâd read The Innovatorâs Dilemma. âCould you come to Washington and talk to me and my staff about your research?â he asked. To me, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
When Secretary Cohen had said âmy staff,â somehow I had imagined second lieutenants and college interns. But when I walked into the secretaryâs conference room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in the front row, followed by the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and then each of the secretariesâ under-, deputy, and assistant secretaries. I was stunned. He said that this was the first time he had convened all of his direct reports in one room.
Secretary Cohen simply asked me to present my research. So using the exact same PowerPoint slides I had used with Andy Grove, I started explaining the theory of disruption. As soon as I had explained how the mini-mills had undermined the traditional steel industry by starting with rebar at the bottom, General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stopped me. âYou have no idea why we are interested in this, do you?â he queried. Then he gestured to the mini-mill chart. âYou see the sheet steel products at the top of the market?â he asked. âThat was the Soviets, and theyâre not the enemy anymore.â Then he pointed to the bottom of the marketârebarâand said, âThe rebar of our world is local policing actions and terrorism.â Just as the mini-mills had attacked the massive integrated mills at the bottom of the market and then moved up, he worried aloud, âEverything about the way we do our jobs is focused on the high end of the problemâwhat the USSR used to be.â
Once I understood why I was there, we were able to discuss what the result of fighting terrorism from within the existing departments would be, versus setting up a completely new organization. The Joint Chiefs later decided to go down the route of forming a new entity, the Joint Forces Command, in Norfolk, Virginia. For more than a decade, this command served as a âtransformation laboratoryâ for the United States military to develop and deploy strategies to combat terrorism around the world.
On the surface, competition in the computer chip market and the proliferation of global terrorism could not seem like more different problems to tackle. But they are fundamentally the same problem, just in different contexts. Good theory can help us categorize, explain, and, most important, predict.
People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirrorâbecause data is only available about the past.
Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You donât want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.
Consider, for example, the history of mankindâs attempts to fly. Early researchers observed strong correlations between being able to fly and having feathers and wings. Stories of men attempting to fly by strapping on wings date back hundreds of years. They were replicating what they believed allowed birds to soar: wings and feathers.
Possessing these attributes had a high correlationâa connection between two thingsâwith the ability to fly, but when humans attempted to follow what they believed were âbest practicesâ of the most successful fliers by strapping on wings, then jumping off cathedrals and flapping hard ⊠they failed. The mistake was that although feathers and wings were correlated with flying, the would-be aviators did not understand the fundamental causal mechanismâwhat actually causes something to happenâthat enabled certain creatures to fly.
The real breakthrough in human flight didnât come from crafting better wings or using more feathers. It was brought about by Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli and his book Hydrodynamica, a study of fluid mechanics. In 1738, he outlined what was to become known as Bernoulliâs principle, a theory that, when applied to flight, explained the concept of lift. We had gone from correlation (wings and feathers) to causality (lift). Modern flight can be traced directly back to the development and adoption of this theory.
But even the breakthrough understanding of the cause of flight still wasnât enough to make flight perfectly reliable. When an airplane crashed, researchers then had to ask, âWhat was it about the circumstances of that particular attempt to fly that led to failure? Wind? Fog? The angle of the aircraft?â Researchers could then define what rules pilots needed to follow in order to succeed in each different circumstance. Thatâs a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in âif-thenâ statements.
The Power of Theory in Our Lives
How do fundamental theories relate to finding happiness in life?
The appeal of easy answersâof strapping on wings and feathersâis incredibly alluring. Whether these answers come from writers who are hawking guaranteed steps for making millions, or the four things you have to do to be happy in marriage, we want to believe they will work. But so much of whatâs become popular thinking isnât grounded in anything more than a series of anecdotes. Solving the challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes what to happen. The theories that I will discuss with you will help you do exactly that.
This book uses research done at the Harvard Business School and in some of the worldâs other leading universities. It has been rigorously tested in organizations of all sizes around the world.
Just as these theories have explained behavior in a wide range of circumstances, so, too, do they apply across a wide range of questions. With most complex problems itâs rarely as simple as identifying the one and only theory that helps solve the problem. There can be multiple theories that provide insight. For example, though Bernoulliâs thinking was a significant breakthrough, it took other workâsuch as understanding gravity and resistanceâto fully explain flight.
Each chapter of this book highlights a theory as it might apply to a particular challenge. But just as was true in understanding flight, problems in our lives donât always map neatly to theories on a one-to-one basis. The way Iâve paired the challenges and theories in the subsequent chapters is based on how my students and I have discussed them in class. I invite you, as you journey through the book, to go back to theories in earlier chapters, just as my students do, and explore the problems through the perspective of multiple theories, too.
These theories are powerful tools. I have applied many of them in my own life; others I wish Iâd had available to me when I was younger, struggling with a problem. Youâll see that without theory, weâre at sea without a sextant. If we canât see beyond whatâs close by, weâre relying on chanceâon the currents of lifeâto guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisionsânot just in business, but in life, too.
You might be tempted to try to make decisions in your life based on what you know has happened in the past or what has happened to other people. You should learn all that you can from the past; from scholars who have studied it, and from people who have gone through problems of the sort that you are likely to face. But this doesnât solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into the future. Instead, using robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of success. The theories in this book are based on a deep understanding of human endeavorâwhat causes what to happen, and why. Theyâve been rigorously examined and used in organizations all over the globe, and can help all of us with decisions that we make every day in our lives, too.