"How Will You Measure Your Life?" Book Review

"How Do You Measure Your Life?" is one of the most exciting self-help books I have come across in years. It starts off like a business book with a blurb that promises to help you find fulfilment using lessons from some of the world's greatest businesses. Deceptively alluring for a Senior Management book-reader, it draws you charmingly into the issues that keep us away from lasting happiness and sense of making a contribution to life.   We gather the book is a creative collaboration between three different folks who have differing views on God and Spirituality. The main author of the book is Clayton M Christensen, who wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma" which became a sensation in triggering a huge debate in what sustains market leadership.This book grew out of a speech Christensen used to give on finding a meaning and happiness in life at Harvard Business School. James Allworth, the second author, is a graduate of the same school where Christensen teaches. Karen Dillon was the editor of Harvard Business Review who helped chisel the thoughts of the duo into an immensely readable and lively commentary on what makes living worthwhile - sometimes bordering on spirituality, most times offering plenty of sage counsel on the right living without being preachy.

The book is neatly divided into ten chapters running to less than 207 pages. It seeks to answer primarily three questions that unlike the Innovator's dilemma, haunt every graduating student: 1. How can I be sure that  I will be successful and happy in my career? 2. How can my relationship with my family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness? 3. How can I live a life of integrity - and stay out of jail? Pretty simple, right? Yet we observe from Rajat Gupta to David Madoff, breaches of integrity abound, even if differing in degrees. Most folks have got a problem with atleast one of the three aspects inquired into by the authors. Christensen offers plenty of refreshed and relevant examples from the world of business, sports and celebrities to take us through a tour of how to answer these three questions so we may find if life's worth it.

Christensen divides the book into three sections each analysing the questions on finding respectively one's mojo in career, family and living a life of integrity without ending up in jail. The chapters on how to choose one's calling in life and the ones on bringing up children are brilliantly analysed with telling value and counter-intuitive evidence from business research. As the author says, " I don't have an opinion. The theory has an opinion." This is not a typical book that gives quick-fix solutions to perennial dilemmas. It gives the right paradigm-changing objective assessment of some of the simplest questions that we must really be asking ourselves in order to make our lives count. I recommend this book irresptive of how early or late you are in life. It sure tickles you to make those critical decisions that will deliver results in all the three areas of life - career, family and character.

"How Will You Measure Your life?" by Clayton M Christensen, James Allworth & Karen Dillon, pp.221, pub. Harper Collins