Do Your Commitments Match Your Convictions?

People usually reassess their priorities only after some personal upheaval—an illness, a divorce, the loss of a job. But with the right framework, you can think through your preferences long before crisis strikes.

by Donald N. Sull and Dominic Houlder

We all hold certain things dear—professional achievement, for example, or family life, or financial security. But when we step back and take stock of our day-to-day actions, we may notice a gap between the things we value most and the way we actually spend our time, money, and attention. It may be a crevice or a chasm, but, in either case, the gap raises questions about how we manage the differences between our professed values and our actual behavior.

Consider the case of Nick, the CEO of a health care products company. (The identities of all the individuals discussed in this article have been disguised to protect their confidentiality.) He turned the organization around after it was taken private by a leveraged buyout firm and has a successful managerial track record in a range of blue-chip and entrepreneurial companies. He is highly regarded by the private-equity investors who own his parent company. But there is a huge gap between what Nick cares about and what he is actually doing. One of the best times in his life, he told us, was when he and his wife took sabbaticals and volunteered for a year with an organization that helps immigrants—a cause that matters greatly to Nick, as the son of immigrants. He misses the time he and his wife spent together that year. “These days, given our schedules, we’re lucky to spend more than one weekend a month together,” he says. Nick also questions his professional impact. “At 50, I know I have five—maybe ten—good work years left,” he says. “But I’m dribbling my life away working in a business that I’m not passionate about and that may or may not make me rich.”

Nick is considering several career options. He could take a different CEO job; headhunters do call with offers. If his company were sold at the right price, he could retire early. He could teach at a business school. Or maybe he could work full-time at the nonprofit where he and his wife volunteered. Although Nick feels dissatisfied most days, he believes that any change must wait until he completes a major product launch at work and perhaps until he sees what happens with his equity. He says he is way too busy to do anything right now about the gap between his values and his working life. He’s been “too busy” for several years running.

Perhaps your first instinct is to give Nick a thorough shaking. But the truth is, many successful people feel a similar disconnect between their daily activities and their deepest desires—and a similar inability to do anything about it. We became interested in that disconnect almost by accident. Since 1997, we have been teaching a course at London Business School on leading strategic transformations in organizations. The conceptual cornerstone of the course is commitments—the investments, public promises, contracts, and so on that bind an organization to a particular way of doing things. The course, and the research that underlies it, analyzes how historical commitments can create inertia that prevents organizations from responding effectively to changes in the competitive environment. It also explores how managers can commit to new business opportunities and thereby transform their companies.

Over the years, many of our midcareer and executive students borrowed the course’s framework of commitments, inertia, and transformation and used it to think systematically about their personal and professional commitments. This happened enough times, and with enough interesting results, that we incorporated into the course a session on managing personal commitments. It even includes a computer-based exercise that lets students simulate personal commitments and track what kind of outcomes they may create—think the Sims discover the meaning of life. In the following pages, we’ll take a closer look at this framework and describe how it can help midlife and other managers in their quest to narrow the gap between their deeply held values and their everyday activities. Let us be clear, though: We can’t—and won’t—try to tell you what the content of your personal commitments should be. We won’t suggest that dedicating yourself to social service is better than making partner. Both are laudable goals. We do hope to help you improve the process by which you manage your personal commitments, whatever they may be.
Defining Commitments

First, let’s define our terms and illustrate them in the business domain. Managerial commitments are actions taken in the present that bind an organization to a future course. When most people think of managerial commitments, they immediately call to mind dramatic actions—Boeing betting the company on the 777, for example, or Oracle acquiring PeopleSoft to build its position in applications software. In the corporate world, executives manage such commitments systematically. No responsible CEO would launch a new product or a make a major acquisition without first conducting methodical research and tracking progress against quantifiable goals. This is Business 101. Yet the most binding commitments in business are often so mundane as to be almost invisible. A company’s ongoing investments in refining and extending an existing technology, for example, can cumulatively lock it onto a technological trajectory from which it is hard to escape. An organization that concentrates its sales efforts on its key customers can become dependent on those clients, limiting the firm’s freedom to pursue other clients and other business options. Taken together, these kinds of mundane commitments can prove as binding as the big bets, yet they rarely receive the same level of scrutiny from managers.

A similar logic applies in our personal lives, where our most binding commitments are frequently the result of day-to-day decisions too small to attract our attention. There are exceptions, of course. Individuals periodically make dramatic commitments, such as changing jobs or getting married. And people who choose certain public-service careers, such as the military and law enforcement, may make the ultimate commitment by giving their life to a cause they believe in. For the rest of us, however, our most important commitments are the result of mundane decisions we make about how to allocate our money, time, and energy. Because these decisions are individually small, it is easy to lose sight of them, and when we do, a gap can grow between what we value and what we do.
Mind the Gap

The first step in managing your commitments is to take a quick inventory of what matters to you. (For a helpful work sheet, see the exhibit “Taking Stock.”) You probably have at least a vague sense of what you value most, but it’s important to clarify those themes from time to time. This exercise lets you check whether you are putting your money (and your time and energy) where your mouth is. A systematic inventory of where your money, time, and energy are going often reveals surprising gaps.