This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. According to conventional wisdom, companies resemble organisms destined to pass through the stages of start-up, scaling, maturity, and decline. In reality, business opportunities--and not firms--pass through these stages, and most organizations consist of multiple opportunities arrayed across the different stages of the life cycle. Executives who understand this crucial distinction can view their organization as a portfolio of opportunities that requires constant re-jiggering to balance the demands of the present with the promise of the future. The authors suggest that, when assessing any opportunity portfolio, executives should remain on the lookout for the following common pathologies: waiting too long to exit a declining business, failing to salvage usable pieces of a business that is shut down, shunning promising new markets because of an overly conservative fiscal approach, trying to scale too many business opportunities so that none of them receives the necessary resources, applying the same management style to business opportunities at different life cycle stages, and erring on the side of loss aversion.

How many of us keep pace day to day, upholding our obligations to our bosses, families, and the community, even as our overall satisfaction with work and quality of life decline? And, yet, our common response to the situation is: "I'm too busy to do anything about it now." Unfortunately, unless a personal or professional crisis strikes, very few of us step back, take stock of our day-to-day actions, and make a change. In this article, London Business School strategy professors Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder examine the reasons why a gap often exists between the things we value most and the ways we actually spend our time, money, and attention. They also suggest a practical approach to managing the gap. The framework they propose is based on their study of organizational commitments--the investments, promises, and contracts made today that bind companies to a future course of action. Such commitments can prevent organizations from responding effectively to change. A similar logic applies to personal commitments--the day-to-day decisions we make about how we allocate our precious resources. These decisions are individually small and, therefore, easy to lose sight of. When we do, a gap can develop between our commitments and our convictions. Sull and Houlder make no value judgments about the content of personal commitments; they've devised a somewhat dispassionate tool to help you take a thorough inventory of what matters to you most. It involves listing your most important values and assigning to each a percentage of your annual salary, the hours out of your week, and the amount of energy you devote. Using this exercise, you should be able to identify big gaps--stated values that receive little or none of your scarce resources or a single value that sucks a disproportionate share of resources--and change your allocations accordingly.