Deep Work_ Rules for focused success in a distracted world ( PDFDrive.com )

The story has become lore in the world of business consulting. In the mid-1990s,
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen received a call from Andy
Grove, the CEO and chairman of Intel. Grove had encountered Christensen’s research
on disruptive innovation and asked him to fly out to California to discuss the theory’s
implications for Intel. On arrival, Christensen walked through the basics of disruption:
entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with
cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap
products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share. Grove recognized that
Intel faced this threat from low-end processors produced by upstart companies like
AMD and Cyrix. Fueled by his newfound understanding of disruption, Grove devised
the strategy that led to the Celeron family of processors—a lower-performance
offering that helped Intel successfully fight off the challenges from below.
There is, however, a lesser-known piece to this story. As Christensen recalls,
Grove asked him during a break in this meeting, “How do I do this?” Christensen
responded with a discussion of business strategy, explaining how Grove could set up a
new business unit and so on. Grove cut him off with a gruff reply: “You are such a
naïve academic. I asked you how to do it, and you told me what I should do. I know
what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it.”
As Christensen later explained, this division between what and how is crucial but
is overlooked in the professional world. It’s often straightforward to identify a
strategy needed to achieve a goal, but what trips up companies is figuring out how to
execute the strategy once identified. I came across this story in a foreword Christensen
wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive
consulting case studies to describe four “disciplines” (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping
companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was
that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more
time working deeply. Just as Andy Grove had identified the importance of competing
in the low-end processor market, I had identified the importance of prioritizing depth.
What I needed was help figuring out how to execute this strategy.
Intrigued by these parallels, I set out to adapt the 4DX framework to my personal
work habits and ended up surprised by how helpful they proved in driving me toward
effective action on my goal of working deeply. These ideas may have been forged for
the world of big business, but the underlying concepts seem to apply anywhere that
something important needs to get done against the backdrop of many competing
obligations and distractions. With this in mind, I’ve summarized in the following
sections the four disciplines of the 4DX framework, and for each I describe how I
adapted it to the specific concerns of developing a deep work habit.