How Will You Measure Your Life?

A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.

find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.

The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. Some work in the most difficult conditions imaginable—disaster recovery zones, countries gripped by famine and flo

Many companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, so companies often favor these and shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

using robust theory to predict what will happen has a much greater chance of success.

You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy.

The first is what I will 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 her

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.

In almost every case of a project failing, mistakes were made in one or more of the critical assumptions upon which the projections and decisions were based.

Does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done in this assignment? The answer: it depends. In a start-up company where there are no processes in place to get things done, then everything that is done must be done by individual people—resources. In this circumstanc