that we never expected to arise in our lives. While some people will argue that you should always have the next five years of your life planned out, others have followed a strategy of just seeing what has come along and will tell you that it’s worked well for them. There’s a time and a place for both approaches. Drawing on our research, I will explain what the best circumstances are to be deliberate, to have that plan; and when it’s best to be emergent—to be open to the unexpected.
The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.
All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. The process is continuous: even as your strategy begins to take shape, you’ll learn new things, and new problems and opportunities will always emerge. They’ll feed back in; the cycle is continuous.
If you can understand and manage this strategy process, you’ll have the best shot at getting it right—of having a career that you will truly love.
Even if you don’t end up getting to be an astronaut.
CHAPTER TWO
What Makes Us Tick
It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.
The Importance of Getting Motivation Right
When I was running CPS Technologies, a company that I founded with several MIT professors early in my career, I had an epiphany of sorts about what motivates us. One summer Saturday, we had a company picnic for our employees’ families in a park near our laboratories. There was nothing fancy about it, but it was a welcome opportunity to get a three-dimensional perspective of our colleagues’ lives.
I walked to the periphery of the group after everyone had arrived, just to figure out who belonged to whom. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Diana, one of our scientists, and her husband, playing with their two children. Diana had a key position in the lab: she was an analytical chemist. Her job was to help the other scientists use our company’s specialized equipment so that they could know what elements were present in the compounds they created or with which they were working. By definition, waiting until the results came back from the tests Diana ran occasionally frustrated some of the twenty or so scientists on the team—each of whom needed his or her test run as the highest priority. But it frustrated Diana even more. She wanted to help everyone, but as a start-up we couldn’t buy unlimited equipment. So there were a limited number of machines and only ten hours in Diana’s workday. As a result, her days were often filled with turf battles.
But that’s not what I saw at that moment. Instead, I was impressed by the love Diana and her husband clearly shared with their two children. Seeing her there, I began to gain a perspective of Diana in the full context of her life. She wasn’t just a scientist. She was a mother and a wife, whose mood, whose happiness, and whose sense of self-worth had a huge impact on her family. I began to think about what it must be like in her house in the morning, as she said good-bye to her family on her way to work.
Then I saw Diana in my mind’s eye as she came home to her family ten hours later, on a day that had gone badly. She felt underappreciated, frustrated, and demeaned; she learned little that was new. In that moment I felt like I saw how her day at work negatively affected the way she interacted in the evening with her husband and their young children.
This vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to the end of another day. On the one hand, she was so engaged by the experiment she was doing that she wanted to stay at work; but on the other, she was so looking forward to spending time with her husband and children that she clearly wanted to be at home. On that day, I saw her driving home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, having been recognized in a positive way for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives for several scientists and for the company. I felt like I could see her go into her home at the end of that day with a replenished reservoir of esteem that profoundly affected her interaction with her husband and those two lovely children. And I also knew how she’d feel going into work the next day—motivated and energized.
It was a profound lesson.
Do Incentives Make the World Go Round?
Six years later, as a new professor, I was standing at the front of a Harvard classroom teaching Technology and Operations Management, a required first-year course for all of our MBA students. In the discussion that day about the case study on a big materials company, a student recommended a way to resolve a conflict with one of their most critical customers. She suggested the company assign a key engineer, Bruce Stevens, to this project—in addition to his other responsibilities. I questioned her: “Asking Bruce to do this makes sense in isolation. But getting Bruce to actually make this his highest priority, on top of an overflowing plate of other responsibilities—isn’t that going to be hard?”
“Just give him an incentive,” was her reply.
“Wow—that sure is a simple answer. What kind of incentive do you have in mind?” I asked.
“Just give him a bonus if he gets it done on time,” she responded.
“The problem,” I said, “is that he has other responsibilities on other projects as well. If he focuses on this as his top priority, he’s going to fall behind on those other projects. So then what are you going to do—give him another financial incentive to motivate him to work harder on all the other projects?” I pointed to a statement in the case about Bruce. He was clearly a driven man, who routinely worked seventy-hour weeks.
When the student said that’s exactly what she would do, I pushed her harder. “All the other employees will see that you are giving Bruce a bonus. Aren’t they going to demand that you treat them similarly? And where does this all lead? Do you feel like paying them specifically for every assignment—moving to a piecemeal system?” I pointed out that in the case the typical engineers in this company were working very hard every day without incentives. “They seem to love their work, don’t they?” I asked.
Another student then added, “I don’t think you can pay Bruce an incentive—it’s against the policy of the company. Pay-for-performance bonuses are typically only given to general managers in business units, not to engineers, because it is at the managerial level where revenues and costs come together. Below that, employees have responsibility only for a piece of the puzzle, so incentives can throw things out of balance.”
“Oh,” I said. “Let me understand what you’re saying. In this company, a lot of the senior executives used to be engineers. During that period of their lives, they seemed to be motivated by the work itself. They didn’t need incentives—right? So then what happened? When they became executives, did they morph into other beings—types of people that needed financial incentives to work hard? Is that what you are telling me?”
As the discussion in the class continued that day, I sensed a broadening rift between my world and that of some of
