How will you measure your life?-Clayton Christensen

How will you measure your life?-Clayton Christensen

Introduction

“How will you measure your life?” is a great speech delivered by an American business consultant, academic and religious leader Clay Christensen. He serves as a professor of Business Administration at the University of Harvard. This great speech was delivered at the TED x Boston Conference to a group of scholars and entrepreneurs. In the introduction statements, Christensen narrates briefly about the correlation of various objects. First, he talks about how the world is organized into a nested system where industries, corporations, business units, teams, people and brains, respectively. A few lines down, the speaker focuses on the idea of disruption and preservation of modularity theories. According to the speaker, the former explains the reasons for business failure and the latter elaborates about the inapplicability of the Euro and SAP system. Generally, Christensen focuses on the reasons why most businesses fail, citing the pursuit of achievement and lack of strategy mechanisms to implement their plans. This speech has employed the use of pathos, logos and ethos rhetorical strategies to bring out the desired ideas.

In his great speech, Christensen has employed the use of ethos strategy to persuade the audience. For instance, when trying to explain the reasons for failure in business, he provides an exemplary story about his days at Harvard. According to him, after graduating from the MBA program in 1979, Christensen and his former classmates have been confining for a reunion every five years since then. To his joy, everybody seemed happy in the first-anniversary meeting as everybody had married and done well with their families. However, many years later, this good image of friends seemed to have faded as most of them came back, having divorced and unhappy. Significantly, it was not anyone’s wish for such to happen as the speaker narrates. The idea here is that such results of the marriage occurred because the subjects in question implemented strategies they never planned to do. Christensen has successfully applied ethics when persuading the audience to understand the mechanism of theories. He references his course at Harvard Business School where he stresses that “…in this course, we study these theories…”Such use of ethos rhetorical strategy is to persuade people to understand the concept of theories.

Clayton Christensen has also extensively appealed to emotions to convince his audiences to understand the point he drives out. For instance, when the speaker is narrating about having studies theories at Harvard, he stresses instead of forcing people to put on lenses and examine how industries and the entire economy is working, he would alternatively request them to review their own lives and provide an explanation as to why the life is the way it is. Such a scenario mirrors precisely what is happening within the companies. Elsewhere, when narrating about the pursuit of achievement, Christensen uses pathos to persuade the entrepreneurs to put more effort in trying to implement the set strategies. He emphasizes that an additional ounce of energy and 30 minutes would lead to the immediate achievement of evidence whatever activities in your life give you the most direct evidence of success. Lastly, the speaker tells the audience; to have payables, receivables and revenues; they must keep an aggregate track of all individual voices.

The last rhetorical strategy is the use of logos which has been applied extensively throughout the TED speech. The first instance of this strategy comes in when Christensen to a few years ago in the telecommunication industry. By a matter of fact, the historically narrates how these companies erupted and were doing very well in the first few days after commencement. However, with time the companies did circuit switching technology leading to the launch of Cisco Company which took over the giants’ market share. Notably, the speaker narrates that the new company led to the invention of router technology which killed circuit switch devices. Secondly, the author uses a time frame to convince the audience that it is not apparent that investments would pay off over a short time. Although you may not see the achievement as invested in your children who tend to misbehave daily, 20 years later would be the best time to flashback and relate to their current situation and appreciate how great they have become. While explaining the measure of success in an individual, Clayton Christensen uses logos rhetorical strategy to explain how to measure success in the case of a business. Technically, the speaker recommends the use of ratio to measure profitability by return on net assets. Conclusively, he points out that if profitability could be statistically measured by return on net assets, so do our success in life.

Christensen’s points appear healthy, and he possesses strong expertise in using ethos, pathos and logos rhetorical strategies to pass his arguments to the audience. The speaker was able to point directly throughout his narration which gives a clear understanding of why people do fail and the ways to assess the success of oneself in life. The speech was practical and relevant to the audience whom in this case, happen to be the entrepreneurs. I liked how each argument by the speaker was accompanied by a stylistic feature to enhance the reality and seriousness of the discussion. Overall, the speech is excellent, but the use of more practical non-complicated scenarios when elaborating on various ideas would make it one of the best.