Just Enough E-Book

Laura Nash

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 503

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In Just Enough, top Harvard professors offer a revealing, research-based look at the true nature of professional success, helping people everywhere live more rewarding and satisfying lives. True professional and personal satisfaction seems more elusive every day, despite a proliferation of gurus and special methods that promise to make it easy. They conclude that many of the problems of success today can be traced back to unrealistic expectations and misconceptions about what success is and what constitutes it. The authors show where the happiest and most well-balanced among us are focusing their energy, and why, to help readers find more balance and satisfaction in their lives.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Recognizing “Just Enough” in a World of “Infinite More”

Why We Wrote This Book

About Our Research

Who Sets the Benchmarks of Enduring Success?

The Framework for Just Enough

Toward a New Perspective

Acknowledgments

PART ONE - MOVING TARGETS

Chapter 1 - Stress! Excess! Success?

Too Many Choices

When Success Feels Just Out of Reach

Success Isn’t a Tease—It’s a Moving Target

When Do We Get to Declare Victory?

What Is the Enough You Want from Success?

We Search for Glory and the Good Life

Success Has a Deeper Structure Than Winning—Just Like Our Needs

“Perfect Success”

Learning from Public Figures

The Rest of the Story

Embrace Conflict

Hitting the Moving Targets

When “Never Enough” Is the Only Good Life

Where Do You Set Your Targets?

An Overarching Target: Enduring Success

Being Prepared for the Right Opportunities

A Brief Illustration in Real Time

Understanding Your Own Landscape of Success

Chapter 2 - The Dangers of Going for the Max

When Reaching for the Stars, Why Think about Limits?

A Nation Rethinks Success

The Best Is Not Necessarily the Highest Score

Maximization Does Not Work as a Measure of Success

Cultural Pressures to Maximize

The Effects of Celebrity Success Thinking

Test Your Baselines of Success for Hidden Celebrity Elements

Backing Off without Dropping Out

It’s More Pervasive than You Might Think

Don’t Drop Out, Just Understand Why Celebrity Lets You Down

The Source of This Myth’s Power

“Success” Has a Shorter and Shorter Life Cycle

Beware the Midas Syndrome

Beyond Celebrity Success

Remember: Success Is about More than One Thing

What It Means for Jane

Chapter 3 - The Satisfactions of Just Enough Success

Peter Ueberroth: One Approach to Enduring Success

Four Markers of the Enduring

Clint Eastwood: Example of the Complex Mix

Our Search for Enduring Successes

Bill Oakley: Extending an Established Success

When Your Goals Are Not Adding Up, It’s Time to Change Your Perspective

PART TWO - THE KALEIDOSCOPE STRATEGY

Chapter 4 - Your Success Profile

The Four Satisfactions of Enduring Success

Sorting Your Conflicts

Madonna: An Interesting Test of the Model

The Kaleidoscope Strategy

What’s Your Success Profile?

Exercise 1: Establish a Baseline

Exercise 2: What Is Your Ideal Picture?

Exercise 3: An Organizational Success Profile

Discerning the Domains of Success

The Ability to Switch and Link

Going Deeper—Sharing Your Profile with Others

Rules for Strict Accounting

Know Your Success Profile

Chapter 5 - Who Are You? And Why Are You Doing That?

The Case for Complexity—And for Taking It a Step at a Time

Drawing on Your Self-Definitions for Success

Self-Definition 1: What Are Your Values and Beliefs?

Self-Definition 2: What Are Your Emotional Needs?

Self-Definition 3: What Are Your Capabilities?

Self-Definition 4: What Context Are You Operating In?

Synergies within the Framework

Alignment and Calibration between Self-Definitions and the Four Categories

Chapter 6 - Complex Patterns in Real Life

The Blackstone Plant at Levi Strauss & Co.

Sarah’s Story

Enough

Katharine Graham’s Journey

Marshall Carter: Crisis as a True Guide to Your Values

Living from Your Real Values

Helping Jane Make a Decision

You Need to Do This

PART THREE - JUST ENOUGH

Chapter 7 - Making Successful Choices

Inside the Kaleidoscope Framework

How Kaleidoscopes Work and How Your Success Works

Kaleidoscpe Strategies and the Choices of Success

Finding Insight Points

What Is Enough?

Getting to Enough through Relational Choices

Achievement Is In-Out

Significance Is Out-In

Legacy Is Out-Out

Happiness Is In-In

Getting the Right Mix

Enough Is about Getting More without Wanting It All

Doing a Reality Check

Making the Right Comparisons

Not Jane’s Story

Chapter 8 - Further Calibrations of Enough

Applying Time to Your Calculations

Multitasking the Orientations of Success

Relational Orientations: You and I Are Two—Not One

Relational Calculations

When Enough Seems Impossible

Are Limits Just for Losers and Lazy People?

Enough Is Pragmatic, Not Sacrilegious

Enough in the Real World

How Much Time Will It Take?

Rich Success in the Real World

The Framework Gets You Something Money Can’t Buy

Chapter 9 - Just Enough for a Lifetime

Getting Off on More Than One Track

The Wisdom of Entropy

Accepting Conflicting Desires

Collapsed Strategy

Sequential Strategy

You Can’t Put the Good Life on Hold

Spiraling and Linking Strategy

If Jane Only Knew

Success Is a Lifetime Process

The Dynamics of Switching and Linking

Comparing the Strategy to Juggling

Ken Hakuta: Success over a Lifetime

The Dependency Effect of Never Enough

You Have to Recognize Enough

A Life in Dynamic Balance

Constructing Your Kaleidoscope

Epilogue

Notes

About the Authors

Index

Copyright © 2004 by Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data:

Nash, Laura

Just enough : tools for creating success in your work and life /

Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-471-45836-8 (cloth)

1. Success in business. 2. Success. I. Stevenson, Howard II. Title.

HF5386. S8715 2004

650.1—dc22

2003020252

To the many from whom we have learned!

Preface

Cherie, Martha, Rosie, Trent, Sean, and Bill: Why are so many high achievers acting like adolescents?

—Headline in More magazine, April 2003

A senior executive at one of our sessions at Harvard Business School told us the following cautionary tale:

Long ago, in ancient China, the king wanted to reward a loyal citizen. The king gave this simple man the right to mark out as much territory as he wished, and that area would be his. All he had to do was walk around, marking off the boundaries of his desired reward, and then return to the king to claim this land.

The man set out, and on the first day he walked three miles. As he turned back to the palace in the far distance, he changed his mind. Perhaps he’d need a bit more, maybe just as far as the eye could see. A week later, he had finished walking this distance. But what if there was a drought or flood? Wouldn’t it be better to mark out enough land for farming and fishing, and maybe a woods for hunting?

It took him a year to complete all of these goals. As he set off to return to the palace and complete the circle, he thought about his children. Would this be enough to pass on to them for 10 generations? Maybe they should have access to the ocean, in case they wanted to become shipping merchants. He walked further. By now he was quite tired, but on he went, inspired by the knowledge that each step was increasing his holdings.

Ten years later, he began his journey back, an old and tired man. Just as he entered the palace, he dropped dead. He never realized the ambitions he had continually adjusted upward. His children had no land. He never enjoyed even a fraction of the good life he sought because of his bondage to “never enough.”

Sound familiar? Every culture has cautionary tales like this one, warning of the dangers of excessive ambition or the penalties for excessive sloth. Unfortunately, they give little guidance on what a more balanced approach might be for those who feel they want to make a mark in this world but have no framework for determining how much success is “just enough.” To answer that question—for achievers in today’s world—we embarked on the research for this book.

Recognizing “Just Enough” in a World of “Infinite More”

Success has always been an American preoccupation, but the definition of success takes on a new urgency today, when every conventional measure of success seems to have a faster burn rate than ever before. During the 1990s, we saw a dramatic rise in the rate of economic growth. Fueled by such radical changes as the Internet, measures of corporate and personal wealth became obsolete almost before the next quarter’s performance results were reported. When the markets inevitably plunged, the paper billionaires and millionaires of the new economy took a haircut to the tune of several trillion dollars.

Overworked and undersatisfied in the boom, overworked and competitively vulnerable in the bust, traditional career paths suddenly seem pointless. What is success if you can’t enjoy it? You mean I have to go out there and do it again? Even a once-simple idea like success in war is quickly shattered into a myriad of untidy problems in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many people feel unprepared for this new world. It’s not just about longer hours at work, uncertain job prospects, questions about retirement and health insurance, nor the newfound sense of peril we felt in witnessing the hottest stocks suffer market meltdown and once unsullied skies host a terrorist attack on New York City. It’s about wanting to build something of lasting value in a world where the ground shifts daily. It’s about wanting to make the most of your life.

At one time, success was a rich idea, representing a varied landscape of virtues, accomplishments, and rewards. Today, it has been reduced to a flat idea of riches. For that we are all the poorer. A few decades ago, a “two-comma” bank account (that’s millions to you and me) used to be considered a mighty big success. But by the mid-1990s, there dangled the possibility of “three-comma” bank accounts by age thirty. As one interviewee told us, “Who wants to be a millionaire when billionaire is the new standard?” Like the simple man in the fable, the idea of success seems to have wandered far afield into an expectation of limitless expansion: getting more, doing more, being more. As author Michael Lewis stated, it’s a world centered on “next” and “The New New Thing,” a landscape of the infinite more. As the ante gets higher, our experience of success has been impoverished. Where there is no possibility of satisfaction, nothing is ever enough.

Which brings us to this book.

Why We Wrote This Book

When we began our research—just after September 11, 2001—we discovered that many people shared the concerns that inspired our project. More than ever, people were asking, “Am I making the most out of my life?” Whether it was a Harvard Business School reunion class at the top of its form, our survey of top executives, or someone downsizing his or her career, the message was refreshing: “Me first” is not all there is. Their problem was not an inability to imagine the good life in terms larger than money, but knowing how to go after it.

Whether your dilemmas are about uses of wealth or sources of pleasure, everyone struggles to some degree with when to go for more and when to say “that’s just enough” and move on. Everyone faces conflicting desires between self-interest and being part of something that requires self-restraint for the sake of community. At one time, it was valid to ask leaders, parents, and workers whether they were doing enough for themselves and for others. Today these questions have nearly been washed away in the glamorous tide of celebrity ambition and celebrity crashes, from Enron to political candidates.

Like many, we’ve been discouraged by the moral failings of the past decade’s success ethos. How to make sense of authority figures who one day seem to exude leadership legitimacy and the next are caught with their hands in the cookie jar or in the wrong bed? Such behaviors have led to a national crisis of trust about those whom we designate leaders. This situation presents a critical challenge not only to business and government as we identify successful leadership traits, but to individuals as they seek to define the terms on which they will pursue future prosperity and a good life.

In Just Enough, we take a fresh look at the foundational assumptions behind the idea of success, and provide a challenging but practical framework you can use to pursue and realize a success that you and others will truly value. Our core message is that success is not about one thing nor an infinite number of things; it is about “just enough.” We found that reaching this state requires your active engagement in four very different kinds of goals: Happiness, Achievement, Significance, and Legacy. These form the basic structure of our success model, and with these tools you can construct your own unique profile. The framework can be helpful to people who are scaling back their career goals and those who are just starting out; to the promising leaders of great organizations and the breakaway seekers of a better vocation.

Our model is absolutely counterintuitive to the advice that tells you the secret to success is passion and focus, focus, focus. Interestingly, research in complex decision making suggests that it is actually possible to reach a constructive sense of limitation more easily in a complex landscape than when you seek one big, far-off goal. Judging by the way in which people seem to resonate to the four categories, it seems that we already have an adaptive capacity for this kind of complexity. The trick is not to kill this complexity in ourselves, but to make room for it.

Before we get to the model, however, a word about the research behind our conclusion is in order.

About Our Research

As educators and businesspeople ourselves, we’ve been studying all kinds of successful people and organizations for a long time. In over 150 Harvard Business School cases and more than a dozen books, we’ve dug into the factors that make entrepreneurs tick, the strategies successful companies employ, and the values driving great leadership. We realized that we had never fully addressed perhaps the biggest question of all, the one that drives all the others: What do we really mean by success?

We each bring somewhat different perspectives to this material. Howard Stevenson’s work in entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and as an entrepreneur himself has ranged from early stage investing to complex mathematical discussions of predictability. Laura Nash drew on humanistic traditions in the classics (in which she has a Ph.D.), sociology, and 20 years of research in business ethics and management. We found that some of the sharpest and most insightful findings of our research emerged from the interplay of our two perspectives.

The research for this book is composed of several strands. First, we conducted more than 60 interviews (over 300 hours) with successful professionals, a survey of 90 top executives attending Harvard Business School management programs, and informal observation of high achievers with whom we work and live. This formed the backbone of our study. We also held more than a dozen model-testing sessions with 50 to 110 executives per session to share our core findings and get further feedback. In nearly one-quarter of these sessions, spouses were also present. Most of these groups were drawn from Harvard Business School (HBS) graduates or current members of the Young Presidents’ Organization and its affiliate groups (CEO and WPO).

We also conducted an extensive review of the problems that the general population reports around success. Our sources of information ranged from media coverage of this topic to conversations with friends, HBS colleagues, family, undergraduates, MBA students, and parents of our children’s friends. We were assisted in this by having the good fortune to work with a number of great companies and business leaders over this period. We talked to people from all walks of life, at every level of the economy, in and out of business careers. Some are stay-at-home parents who had once worked full time, others were at the pinnacle of their careers.

We compared our findings with many new studies on work attitudes, happiness, and life satisfaction research; ongoing developments in the emotional intelligence and leadership field; and classic discussions of the good life in literature, history, and economics. Given the vast range of recent research in some of these areas, we’ve tried to keep the footnotes to a minimum and summarize this material.

Too often, success advice bifurcates into management tactics or psychological self-help. We felt both perspectives were critical. You cannot separate individual success from the success of the organizations in which we are imbedded: family, work, community, and the world. Our goal is to enhance your ability to handle legitimate performance difficulties in today’s business environment and to help you understand how this skill depends on deeper commitments to an authentic view of success.

This led us to study the types of accomplishment that account for “real” success in people’s minds—in and out of work—as well as how they proceeded to get there. We asked foundational questions and probed for concrete examples. We talked with people one-on-one and in groups about their experiences and their emotions. We discussed their values as well as their context. We were looking not only for technique, but for a critical point of view that would answer some of the deep concerns we hear voiced by our own students and that we ourselves share: Whom do you think your success should benefit? What is the purpose of business? At what point does individualism and the search for freedom turn into selfishness and social destruction? Where does happiness come in? How do self-reliant high achievers share their good fortune and transform their accomplishments into platforms for other people’s success?

We believe that these are critical questions in today’s society, when a culture of genius performance and winner-take-all repeatedly reinforces entitled behavior and short-sighted decisions. In the face of so many phony victories, we urgently need an understanding of success in a way that gets real: that provides satisfaction for people who don’t have perfect knowledge and limited energy; people who are subject to the vagaries of fortune but still want to exert active control over creating enduring value in their own lives.

Who Sets the Benchmarks of Enduring Success?

From the outset we faced a serious methodological puzzle. Whose life would be a benchmark of success? We resisted the idea that mere achievement on some business scale would provide a foolproof example. If nothing else, the past decade has taught us the danger of drawing our success intelligence from the most recent superstars in business and politics. How many times did the experts on excellence have to recant almost before the ink dried? Our advice is not about how to become someone else’s idea of making it, but how to effectively read and negotiate the many dimensions of your own aspirations—now and in the future.

We have not relied on celebrity to make our case for a deeper effectiveness—nor should you. You have to get real about success if you are to deal with its many challenges and rewards. From the outset, we were determined to honor the complex, diverse feelings that we have seen people bring to the questions of career, achievement, and the good life. We also believe that every individual has a unique profile of success that they should seek to fill in.

On the other hand, we weren’t writing a values-neutral essay in self-esteem. Self-funded dabblers in manufacturing new forms of sealing wax were excluded from our research unless they had something else to recommend them. Instead, we applied a rough cluster of attributes that in our observation represent the successful alignment of personal satisfaction and success on multiple measures: high achievement, multiple goals in life, the ability to experience pleasure, the ability to create positive relationships, and a value on accomplishments that endure. In our experience, you can often find someone succeeding on two of these factors, but not necessarily all of them.

Selection Criteria

Our precise achievement threshold was variable. Our subjects include the high-achieving school teacher, the resourceful salesperson, the accomplished parent, housecleaners, and, of course, many business executives. We were not particularly concerned that they be at “the top” of the highest achieving organization in their sector, because in many cases that position was occupied by a person with a narrower horizon of success measures and personality traits than interested us. Factors that we considered were:

1. Outward and varied success: The selection criteria for recognizable achievement at a high level was that they had obtained a significant measure of outward success in comparison with their peer group—a category we came to call the upper 1 percent. We used this rough measure in the belief that although internal values are the ultimate guiding star, external comparisons are inescapable and essential to any useful model of success. Our subjects were undeniably high achievers on some score that others were also keeping and felt was important. Their success was plausible and theoretically desired by others. Their jobs ranged from screenwriter to insurance executive, from facilities maintenance person to chairman of a Fortune 100 firm.

The variety of their accomplishments speaks to a fundamental assumption in this book: success cannot be limited to some extreme subset of activities in society. It is a domain in which all people participate to greater or lesser degrees. Some of the most admirable successes have occurred when people make a success out of dealing with a serious illness or family crisis. Some of the most revealing failures have occurred in the lives of those who temporarily occupied the top. Working on this assumption, we present a fascinating variety of observations from the ordinary-extraordinaries. People everyone can admire and emulate.

2. Multiple goals: Our second major criterion for research was achievers who had multiple goals on their success horizon, driven by an acknowledgement of various emotional needs, including the ability to experience pleasure across several domains: work, family, private time, in community. This is not the star who gives up family and friends in order to fulfill the demands of career, but the talented person who also works hard but has a life. It’s the parent who cuts back on career for the sake of children but does not become lost in the mom role or dad role to forsake all other aspects of his or her identity. It’s the CEO whose mission is to improve some condition in the world as well as increasing her own power and fortune.

3. Positive contribution: Our third criterion for research was frankly even more value-biased. We were not interested in just any achievement, regardless of its social value. We wanted to study people with the demonstrated aim of making a positive contribution to something besides themselves. When push comes to shove, they aren’t always choosing their own interests first. As our surveys revealed, the most common measure of success among those we studied was “making a difference in the world”—whether directed at child raising, the arts, a customer group, employee relations, world peace, public health, nonprofit and political activity, or providing positive stock returns to total strangers who have placed their life savings in your firm.

4. In it for the long term: We also sought out companies and people who aren’t in it for the short-term buzz. This is the bias you see in companies that are committed to staying financially healthy over the long haul and renew the community whose resources they are using up. You see it in people who reign in their appetites for endless consumption in favor of purchases or experiences that will continue to please; in institutional structures that provide opportunities in which people can grow for life; in families that seek to equip their children to be successful in their own right.

5. Autonomy/empathy balance: Success can make you a stranger to yourself. The great successes risk personal isolation even from those they love most. Our interest lay in those who overcome these dangers, who can be at the center of their own small mystery and yet be attuned to the worth of others. One word for this quality is humility. Another is humanity. We sought out people who, whatever their wealth or accomplishment, are not totally performance-driven or self-absorbed, who are able to experience intrinsic satisfaction from their activities. People who identify with others and still feel comfortable in their own skin. Call it a balance between autonomy and empathy, or in moral terms an I/We point of view (a term used in Amitai Etzioni’s book, The Moral Dimension). We think it is a critical balance and a fundamental factor in a person’s ability to live and work with integrity.

And this brings us back to the Chinese man’s dilemma we confronted at the beginning of this introduction: How can we recognize when we have found just enough from success—for ourselves and others—in a world of the infinite more?

The Framework for Just Enough

In our interviews, an intriguing point kept surfacing: Approached in the right way, success can offer a rich palette of satisfactions of different emotional needs. These findings offer a refreshing alternative to a frequently voiced view that high achievement is only possible for those with a neurotic sense of inadequacy. We saw a very different picture and have developed a framework here that will help you do the same.

Shifting Targets Happen

The first challenge is to accept the paradoxical concept that although worthwhile and lasting success is dependent on a knowledge of what has permanent value in your life, this ideal will inevitably take the form of a multidimensional, continually shifting set of targets. Some targets are things you desire to have as pieces of your success, and you pursue them with vigor. Others aren’t visible from where you stand, but you have to be ready to adjust your goals later. Some are unreachable—idealized or fantastically ambitious targets disguised in the language of greatness or charisma. Other targets are reachable but the prize is not satisfying, so you may want to pass them up in favor of something else. Ultimately, the pattern of targets that you seek to hit is yours to define, and they in turn define you. In the Zen of success intelligence, you are both the target and the shooter.

You probably have already experienced the dilemma of moving targets as you try to balance work and family needs, or when you have completed a difficult task only to feel slightly “empty” over the results. Success that creates a positive contribution for yourself and for others requires seeing this multiplicity as necessary and turning it into something desirable. People want to learn how to negotiate this complex landscape and feel the journey is worthwhile. The good news is that we discovered many people who not only care about achieving a success that doesn’t devalue their own deep values, they have learned to execute the complex challenges this necessitates taking on.

The Four Categories of Satisfaction from Success

You can create your own stable base by applying a framework that brings order to this chaos. In this book, you will be introduced to four irreducible categories, which we discovered in every interviewee’s ultimate understanding of success: Happiness, Achievement, Significance, and Legacy. These are things people want to establish about themselves and experience when they think of being a success. Even their external targets—such as reaching a certain financial goal—tend to expect these satisfactions, however much their activities may be aimed at one thing.

Knowing the distinctive features of these four categories helps you articulate what it is you are seeking in a certain activity, and we found this categorizing ability has its own power in motivating more decisive action. The categories also impose an important set of standards on success. When you achieve these goals, success feels satisfying and worthwhile:Just enough. Unlike achievements or pleasures that fade almost as soon as they occur, this kind of accomplishment endures. It represents time well spent, a life lived well.

We also found that the four categories work like a fractal pattern; they replicate on different scales of activity, time, and relationships. This “repeated constant” makes the framework particularly powerful in helping sort out the multiple targets of your life. You will see how using this framework as both a template and an ordering device brings an added richness to episodes that demand great commitment. That’s no small sense of progress.

One of the great ah-has of our research was the realization that however much people might describe their activities in “collapsed” terms that imply you can have all four satisfactions at once, these same people were actually rapidly switching attention. They were applying various emotional and relational perspectives to their activities. The faster they could switch and link these accomplishments, the more often they created a sense of meaningful, satisfying activity.

The Kaleidoscope Strategy

The four categories will help you identify the nature of your success goals and the essential perspectives you must apply to each. But you must still actively compare and select among the many different possibilities. How do you keep the pieces separate and still hold the picture of your life together? We introduce the concept of the kaleidoscope strategy to address this fundamental problem. This strategy offers you a special kind of framework that allows you to hold your many aspirations up to the light and observe their changing patterns.

We found the kaleidoscope to be a great image because—like life—it is inherently about complexity, change, and relationships. If you think of the four chambers of a kaleidoscope as representing our four success categories in a coherent relationship, the colored chips that fill them are created by the things you accomplish that actually deliver these satisfactions. The intriguing patterns are formed by the goals you choose to pursue from all the moving targets on your path. With this organizing concept, you will begin to see how success does not have to be a lifelong chase after the biggest, most perfect chip, but rather a skillful interplay among the chips that makes the most satisfying patterns for you.

Some people seem to be under the impression that each time they tire of the pieces in their kaleidoscope, they can just throw it out and find another one. We saw just the opposite: Enduring organizations are built by people who choose wisely not just for today, but for the future as well. We’d like to help equip you to deal with this kind of complexity in your own pursuit of success. Not only will you be more likely to feel accomplished and fulfilled, the welfare of a nation’s basic institutions depends on it.

A Reasoned Calculation of Just Enough

If success has an ordered, four-part complexity that arranges itself in shifting patterns, like a kaleidoscope, how can you capture the full spectrum within a reasonable time? How can you shift your attention so as not to go down with your one glorious and narrow win?

We found the answer in the concept of a reasoned sense of enough, a capacity that is particularly threatened in today’s world of the infinite more, “bests,” and maximized performance. Instead of trying to have it all and do it all, you have to learn to recalibrate to go after just enough. The critical level that gets you there is determined by a reasoned calculation of what will really satisfy your particular needs in one category for now, for tomorrow, and for the larger picture. Beyond that, you really begin to waste your energy at the cost of your opportunity to address your other needs.

Developing this capacity takes real skill. We walk you through both the signs of enough and ways to exercise it in the right proportions to achieve the full spectrum of expectations around success. At first hearing, enough may sound like a negative concept—as in, “That’s it, Junior, I’ve had enough.” In this book, we suggest a deliberate approach to enough that transforms the process of getting to enough from a negative state of satiation (that is, being so overloaded you now feel repulsed by a formerly desirable thing) to a positive state of satisfaction. Recognizing this state and that it differs from other kinds of satisfaction you may seek allows you to put that activity down, knowing it is enough for the moment.

When applied to the four categories of success, the concept becomes a powerful motivational tool. You give yourself permission to experience the rewards you seek and pace yourself to accommodate important emotional and energy needs. Yet you are able to return to a task knowing you have not done enough to satisfy your ambitions for the future. This is the pattern on which lasting contributions are obtained without giving up a multidimensional life.

Some people learn to deliberately cultivate this state of appreciation through nonrational exercises, such as meditation or philosophies of simplicity. We are not trying to replace such techniques, but rather to offer a rational set of decisions tools as well. When it comes to success, there are both emotional “enoughs” and pragmatic “enoughs” to be considered. These can and must be approached not only with emotional and philosophical intelligence, but with rational care.

The Components of Your Self-Definition

Enough in light of what? According to our model, in light of creating that larger picture of the four chambers in the kaleidoscope of success. A feedback loop is created with continual reference to your inner core and self-definitions that shape your goals: your values and beliefs, your own capacities development, multiple emotional needs, and the context in which you are placed. Each of these important drivers will be explored with surprising connections to achieving satisfaction in the four categories.

Toward a New Perspective

This book is about changing your perspective on the parameters of success in order to develop an organized set of tactics for accomplishing the very different satisfactions you seek. We assist you in the process by offering a model that helps people and organizations:

• Anticipate and sort the basic expectations of success (Happiness, Achievement, Significance, Legacy).

• Set limits on your desires so that you can regularly experience satisfaction along the way and make room for multiple kinds of success (the kaleidoscope strategy).

• Learn what shapes your goals (the components of your self-definition).

• Learn how to direct the right degree of resources toward each basic desire with the right timing ( Just Enough).

The frameworks help you adopt the model in workable pieces, chapter by chapter. They offer a comprehensive, practical instrument for viewing your own attitudes and pursuit of success—or those of your organization. The kaleidoscope strategy offers you a special kind of lens through which you view your aspirations and accomplishments—past, present, and future. You don’t have to hold your life up to the light of this model every minute. But by using it regularly to take a reading on how your pursuit of success is going, you can free yourself of many of the stresses, blind alleys, and addictions that can overwhelm even the most accomplished people and companies.

We especially direct our findings to the many talented people who are burning themselves out or turning their back on common causes in their desire to simplify the demands of “never enough.” Rather than discard or neglect your aspirations out of a sense of deep constraint, it is critical to tame them into a framework that reconnects you to sustainable achievement and the recognition that even when the going gets tough, you are engaged in something of enduring value. We cannot and would not presume to tell you what you want in terms of success. We can give you a strategy for seeing it more clearly, anticipating the demands ahead of you, and knowing when you have achieved the satisfactions of “just enough” from success.

Acknowledgments

Were we to mention all the people to whom we are most sincerely grateful for the development of this book, our ecological conscience on paper consumption would be seriously violated. Our sources of information and inspiration have sprung from more than three hundred surveyed executives and interviewees, our back files of work with businesspeople and students over our own long careers, our unusual combination of educational perspectives, and the encouragement of our friends and families. Interviewees, many of whom wished to remain anonymous, were particularly patient with the process.

Life at Harvard Business School presents an unusual opportunity to test our ideas with incredible colleagues, alumni, and participants in the executive programs. We are grateful for their interest and their comments. We conducted several faculty research presentations as the study unfolded, and for those who barely recognize the final product, happy reading and thank you for keeping our thinking open-minded.

Specific mention should be made of the editorial and research support we received. Harvard Business School’s Division of Research provided all funding for the research. Our unit research director, now unit chair Teresa Amabile, offered critical help with survey development at the start of the project. Gail Ross, with the help of Howard Yoon and Jenna Land at Gail Ross Literary Agency, helped us develop the proposal for the book and find the right editor, Airié Stuart at John Wiley & Sons supported by Jessica Noyes and Emily Conway. Special thanks goes to those who worked most closely with us on the final shaping of Just Enough:

Theresa Gaignard composed the chapter artwork and Nicole Chryssicas created the cover design. Naomi Lucks Sigal added her impeccable editorial insight and old-fashioned last-minute dedication to the manuscript completion. We hope they will all consider this book a concrete product of their joint efforts.

Most of all, we thank our families who taught us a great deal about the meaning of success while they suffered with us through the process of writing. Thank you Tom, Alexandra, and Corinna. Thank you Fredericka, Michon, Trevor, Devin, Cavan, Will, Charley, and Andy. Thank you to all the other friends who serve as great examples!

PART ONE

MOVING TARGETS

Chapter 1

Stress! Excess! Success?

Young Millionaires: What Do They Know That You Don’t?

—Headline from cover of Entrepreneur magazine, November 2002

“Jane” is an attractive, bright, 30-year-old woman with a passion for life. We met her completely by chance at an isolated bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the southern Utah desert, where she was taking some time off from work to think about her life. She and her significant other, Joe, were hiking the back country near Monument Valley, on a spiritual quest to resolve an important question with very practical implications: Should Jane quit her successful job in software to pursue a career in sacred music?

She was fully qualified to do either. Jane had majored in music and math as an undergraduate, and then put herself through music seminary by playing the organ in a local church. Afterward, she’d taken a good job at a startup software firm in her college city. It was a fun and intense team-oriented experience. Her boss was very supportive of her and the tasks were both challenging and lucrative. But after four years on the job, the money and success didn’t seem to make up for the stress she felt in this position. How could something so good feel so bad?

As she and Joe talked about the future, the possibility of marriage and kids, and their mutual love of outdoor adventures, Jane found herself torn between competing desires. The software job was a real ego-booster, the people terrific, and the pay high enough to subsidize an apartment in the city. The long hours were tough, though, and she missed having more time for friends. She reflected on all those concerts she wasn’t attending, all those hours of problem solving at work that left her too tired to really enjoy her time with Joe. Her job was giving her a sense of real accomplishment, but something about it was wearing her down—especially when she thought about doing the same thing for another 20 years. Ironically, her problem wasn’t that the job was wrong for her, but that it was right.

We asked Jane what bothered her the most about this situation. She fell silent, chewing on a piece of homemade bread to buy some time. Her face puckered, and she was clearly in distress. As last she said with a frown, “It’s not just about time. It’s about the whole picture—wanting to do different things and not knowing how to make it work.” As we murmured encouragement, she suddenly said with dawning awareness, “There’s an emotional element to this that the success books don’t get at. I’ve done the right things. I already have ‘success.’ But it’s not enough.”

When Jane laid out all the pieces of her problem, we could see why she felt so troubled. Though she was succeeding at her job in software and had the right personality to become a star in her company, another part of her was longing to be involved in music, her true passion. Playing and listening to music provided a satisfaction that was very important and very different from what satisfied her about her software job. Jane missed the sense of contribution and significance that she’d had as a part-time church organist.

But realistically, as a person with high competitive standards, she believed she was actually more talented at solving business problems than as a professional musician. And what about her lifestyle? Her software job was financially lucrative. If she went into a career inside a church, she’d never be able to afford more than a one-room apartment in town. She did not want to live in the suburbs where she’d be isolated from her friends and the culture of the city.

She felt she had to have a certain amount of living space around her. In addition, nature was aesthetically and politically important to her, witness the hiking trip and her interest in the solar-powered hostelry where we conducted the interview—40 miles from the next town in the heart of a sacred space in the wilderness.

However she thought about these complaints, Jane couldn’t seem to get control over the dissonance in her own makeup. Each aspect of her character generated a different but possible career or lifestyle. She felt as if she were wandering through a landscape of moving targets. Just as one goal seemed right and reachable, and she took aim to reach it, another popped up that seemed equally appealing and reachable. But try as she might, she could not make all of her interests and needs fit into one cohesive picture.

Intuitively, Jane knew this wasn’t just a logistical problem of choosing the right job or recalibrating her financial goals. Her anxiety centered on the larger question of success itself.

Jane wanted to be a success, but not necessarily like the pumped-up entrepreneurs celebrated in the financial magazines and lionized at her fifth college reunion. However, she could find no magazines or models for the alternative success she was seeking. What did it look like? How did it feel? How could the choices she faced be framed to reflect the many aspects of her unique nature and still pave the way to success? What tactics should she use to achieve all the pieces of that puzzle? She felt in danger of becoming like the proverbial donkey who starved to death standing between two stacks of straw because he couldn’t make up his mind which one to go after.

Too Many Choices

If Jane is ever going to leverage her talents into a positive outcome, she needs a base on which to stand. Before making a change, she needs a better understanding of where she is now. This process is partly associated with the domain of emotional intelligence that expert Daniel Goleman calls “self-awareness.”1 But Jane needs to develop more than her emotional baseline; she needs to assess the concrete trajectories of her current situation or she may not be able to get what she wants. Why is this so difficult for her?

Jane’s dilemma is not unusual today, nor are her problems confined to her generation. In an era that proudly proclaims “no limits,” it is commonplace to feel trapped between contradictory possibilities, paralyzed by moving targets and unable to accommodate or even order all the opportunities. Even retiring workers entertain urges to start another business, improve their golf, develop a long-neglected interest, or do something wholly new. Parents with careers hit many moments of reassessment in the course of raising children. Their decisions are not just about time management but about who they want to be in the deepest sense of the word. Some use this self-awareness to reposition their careers toward family needs. Others transform their nurturing inclinations into positions of greater responsibility in their companies.

Such moments of personal reinvention can be liberating, but without some disciplining framework, they can quickly deteriorate into a sense of bondage to the evolving “more.” For example, consider two young friends who seek financial wealth by starting a public relations firm. They vow to each other that they’ll consider themselves satisfied when they have a $1 million in the bank. The first has a meteoric success and moves his stopping point to $10 million. The other, also successful, has spending habits that delay him from reaching his original goal. Neither is able to develop a sense of mastery over the many possibilities that they see for themselves: things, jobs, relations, fun, status. As a current MBA student put it, in thinking about what his ideal life would be 10 years from now:

The truth of the matter is that I have no idea how I will make all of this work. I want to be a superhero—to run a company, have children, keep a beautiful home, and have a loving spouse. I want to take a grand vacation in Italy. I want to be a leader who contributes to the well being of society. I want to sit on boards of nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

I want to be the boss. I want to win. I want to be recognized in the newspaper and to be the recipient of numerous accolades and awards.... As a result, I have a hard time stepping out of my fantasy world to predict what will truly happen in the future. But the one lesson that I have learned from the past is to be careful of what you wish for, because it just might come true.

In this poignant moment of truth, we see a person excited about having many targets but self-mocking because it is so unlikely that he’ll be able to reach all of them and also because he’s not sure where to go first—and clearly, that’s not the typical platform from which greatness is achieved. He has no conception of a middle ground where multiple steps could be taken in pursuit of the things he thinks he might want out of success. He wants many things on a grand scale; but unlike his cohorts who eagerly signed up to kill themselves on a predictable fast-track position after business school, he hasn’t yet chosen to pursue even one of his ambitions. Dripping with irony, he puts a good face on the prospect before him: enduring the path to a success he’s not sure he wants.

When Success Feels Just Out of Reach

When we looked at the future goals of an entire MBA class that was about to graduate, we were struck by how frequently these students accept the idea that they are destined to be two entirely different people in life: the one their cohorts know, who will find a lucrative position in a Hobbesian world of self-interested accomplishment, and the future self whom no one knew: the person who would make a larger contribution to society, be a surprisingly good parent, and maybe even master the guitar. It’s as if they are standing on the edge of a cliff, sure of their footing now, and planning a future leap to the other side. Except that there is no bridge between here and there.

You may think of this as a choice to be made later, when you have the time, but for most people that idealized future self represents values that are being put on the line now. Some will keep moving fast enough to ignore the signs when they become hardened to their own best impulses. Others, like Jane, will be so sensitive to the trade-offs and sense of loss that they jeopardize their chances of reaching any goal in the face of their own indecision.

At one time this problem would simply have been described as the cost of success. But we’ve become accustomed to entertaining simultaneous, multiple meanings about ourselves and our environment. We accept incoherency as normalcy, preferring to hope for it all rather than make a choice. We accept that focus is good and bad (as when it keeps you from going home at night). Our educational systems frequently don’t prepare us for this complexity, especially for the problem of resolving noncomparable choices. When you’re practicing to make the varsity soccer team, you’re feeling guilty about not doing your all for your grade point average.

Success Isn’t a Tease—It’s a Moving Target

When William James famously called success a “bitch goddess” that the world gives and takes away,2 he was referring to that peculiarly powerful combination of desire and dread that money and making it provokes in our culture. You see an ad in the subway that proclaims: “An Acme Diploma will help you achieve the success you deserve!” What can this be about but financial success, the American dream of the one sure path to personal transcendence? Raise your material circumstances and great things will follow—unless, of course, you lose your head and your conscience. In which case, your meteoric rise to the top, complete with stock options, may end up in a perp walk. Or, like a recent editor of the New York Times, your lifelong dream to create a great newspaper goes up in smoke after you bend the rules to meet your other organizational goals. Or, through no fault of your own, you simply experience the first really unstable negative market in 20 years and you become one of the 175 formerly hot Internet firms that went out of business in 2000, or one of the bottom 80 percent of today’s dot-coms predicted to fail within the next 12 months. Reality strikes everyone: One member of the Young President’s Organization attending a Harvard session estimated that he and his friends in Silicon Valley collectively lost $150 billion in market value in the previous year.

Bring that down to human scale and it’s about young college kids and long-term professionals suddenly discovering that the success talents that were clear winners just a few short years ago are now considered incompetencies. Corporations and people are told they must constantly “reinvent ” themselves, which raises a really interesting question: When do you get to enjoy and thrive on who you are now?

The escalating choices in all our lives—at least as suggested by what others seem to have or do—has also escalated the instability relating to knowing what you should actually pursue and be satisfied in completing. The last week of May 2003 was one of those moments when it became particularly clear that we all live in a world of moving targets and that they are changing at an ever more rapid pace. In that week, two important sports events took place: the fiftieth anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Mt. Everest, and the entry of Annika Sorenstam in the Colonial Country Club’s LPGA tournament. Scores of climbers raced to break records at the top of the world, while Sorenstam moved out of women’s competitions to challenge the longstanding male markers of golf success. Both events featured only the most experienced and talented athletes. Success couldn’t be simpler, right?

Well, not quite. In fact, the markers kept changing. Whereas only a few days earlier winning the Colonial was the measure of success, once Sorenstam entered, it was about making the final cut or even just getting through the opening rounds without becoming spooked by the media attention. Meanwhile, on Everest, a number of records were made and broken with lightning speed. In one week new targets were set for oldest, youngest, fastest (set again a few days later), and most frequent climbers.

But it’s not happening just in sports. Everyone seems to be struggling with the Tantalus effect. This mythological character was punished with an eternal, raging thirst. To make things worse, he was placed in the middle of a magic lake whose waters receded every time he tried to take a drink. So, too, just as you seem to reach a tantalizing success or goal, your position of competitive dominance is snatched away—or you change the target yourself! We break up 30-year marriages to start life over; we abandon successful careers to take time for ourselves. In such an environment, it’s natural to wonder whether our past 30 years were really a success or an illusion of success.

When Do We Get to Declare Victory?

There is an inherent bias in Western and Eastern value systems toward linking what we value with that which endures—whether it is someone’s character in the face of temptation, a religious belief in the face of hardship, or the truth of a great piece of literature. In his classic essay on the genius of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope called this kind of enduring knowledge “literary truth.” However many other plays are written, the truth of Hamlet’s insights will not be replaced by these other creations. He contrasted this type of truth with what he called “scientific truth,” which he noted is more temporary. A new discovery of scientific truth can replace old discoveries, as the discoveries of Galileo replaced the truths of Copernicus only to be superceded by Einstein.

Success straddles each of Pope’s types of truth. Like scientific truth, it is a journey of constant change and replacement. One goal or desire replaces another and demands a shift in attention. But to feel authentic, the past episodes must also have something of lasting value, the equivalent of “literary” or moral truth. Something that endures and is meaningful. This latter kind of value is harder to determine for yourself when the external measures of success are constantly readjusting on the paradigm of “scientific” truth. It is not that shifts in success measures are wrong, but rather that constant shifting without some lasting value to balance it feels meaningless.

Given our deep-seated association of value with the enduring, it’s difficult to view today’s rapid-fire disruption of success with dispassion. Like Jane, the more our targets shift and move, the less settled we feel. So many targets surround us that we can lose all power to move forward effectively. Success takes on a flat, collapsed dimension that gives little satisfaction. The climb to success begins to resemble an Escher drawing of a staircase that goes nowhere.

You wouldn’t think so, however, when you read the celebrations of money and achievement touted in the press or at motivational seminars. We live in a culture that glorifies, lionizes, and simplifies the presentation of success. Time and again we are all exposed to top achievers who are admired for their current wins—the entrepreneur who’s founded three groundbreaking corporations in a row, the person in your firm who got a bigger promotion, the child who makes the all-state soccer team. In our research we learned to be alert for “the rest of the story” as we studied people’s accomplishments and their models of success. When we probed further, we found that many were not necessarily doing very well with their other targets: family, long-term business health, building a place to work that people actually value, developing a personal character that holds up when they got out of the public spotlight. As they themselves discovered, no matter how much money they have made, there’s always someone out there who’s richer or more powerful. Even Bill Gates has his Sultan of Brunei for comparison!

What Is the Enough You Want from Success?

Part of the problem for us all is not knowing what we want from success—what is just enough. To escape the buffeting of every new choice out there, you have to be prepared to go beyond generalities and really assess what it is you are seeking:

• What will challenge you?

• What will make a difference in the world?

• What will attract you?

• What will endure even after you’ve moved on?

We found that on first pass, many people say they “just” want happiness from success: things, family security, self-esteem, membership in an elite group. Oh, and maybe a sense of accomplishment. (Wait for it.) Oh yes, and perhaps a certain degree of variety and challenge. . . yes, but it’s all ultimately about doing something of use in the world.

Such generalized statements are typical. On the one hand, they make sense. Even Aristotle noted that our happiness was composed of many desired ends and not just one. On the other hand, the glamorization of success doesn’t prepare you for the push-pull of having quite so many contradictory claims. People go mad seeking success—and many go even madder once they possess it. We suffer angst over not being a success, and we fear being a success and losing our soul. In 1967, the writer Joan Didion observed that the most publicized self-doubts in America were Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, and the Bomb.3 In 2003, the most publicized self-doubts are Iraq, SUVs, Dr. Atkins’ diet advice, and financial success. They summarize our collective sense of what we should seek to do or acquire even as we feel dread about the possible side effects.

And yet what’s the alternative? Even if you hate thinking of yourself as baldly pursuing success, would you seriously suggest that this is the wrong object of universal quest as long as it’s real success as you define it? Isn’t it rather like the holy grail—dangerous but impossible to resist? If you succeed in securing success, you possess a powerful talisman against want and rejection, like the Yiddish observation that the man who has money is a good singer—and he can dance, too! But like any grail, this one causes the informed seeker to entertain second thoughts. What price will the quest exact? Will the grail really deliver the dazzling but vague blessings we expect from obtaining it?

We Search for Glory and the Good Life

The perplexing glory and pain of success is an age-old moral problem and not just an American anxiety. In Homer’s Iliad,