How Will You Measure Your Life?: Using Innovation Theory to Create a Life Strategy for Career, Relationships, and Integrity

From the world’s leading thinker on innovation and New York Times bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen, comes an unconventional book of inspiration and wisdom, offering a powerful business philosophy for life. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, notably the only business book that Apple’s Steve Jobs said "deeply influenced" him, is widely recognized as one of the most significant business books ever published. Now, in the tradition of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life is a book of lucid observations and penetrating insights for personal development, designed to help any reader―student or teacher, mid-career professional or retiree, parent or child―forge their own paths to fulfillment.

Applying the same world-renowned theories he used to predict disruption in business, Christensen provides powerful decision-making strategies to help you answer life’s most important questions:

• Finding Happiness in Your Career: Go beyond the myth that incentives are the same as motivation to discover what truly makes you tick and find a job you will love.
• A Strategy for Your Life: Learn when to stick to a deliberate plan and when to embrace unexpected opportunities to create a life strategy that actually works.
• Deepening Personal Relationships: Understand why investing in your relationships with your spouse, children, and friends is the most important long-term investment you will ever make.
• Living with Integrity: See how the trap of marginal thinking can lead to compromising your values, and why it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than 98% of the time.

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN (1952–2020) was the Kim B. Clark Professor at Harvard Business School, the author of nine books, a five-time recipient of the McKinsey Award for Harvard Business Review’s best article, and the cofounder of four companies, including the innovation consulting firm Innosight. In 2011 and 2013 he was named the world’s most influential business thinker in a biennial ranking conducted by Thinkers50.

A native of Australia, JAMES ALLWORTH is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar, and the Australian National University. He previously worked at Booz & Company and Apple.

KAREN DILLON is the former editor of the Harvard Business Review and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life? She is a graduate of Cornell University and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In 2011 she was named by Ashoka as one of the world’s most influential and inspiring women.