Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

What job did you hire that product to do?

If those cockpits could be redesigned to fit the average pilot in the 1950s, the problem should be solved, the Air Force concluded. So how many pilots actually fell into the definition of average after this enormous undertaking? None, Rose reports. Every single pilot had what Rose called a “jagged profile.” Some had long legs, while others had long arms. The height never corresponded with the same chest or head size. And so on. The revised cockpits designed for everyone actually fit no one. When the Air Force finally swept aside the baseline assumptions, the adjustable seat was born. There’s no such thing as “average” in the real world. And innovating toward “average” is doomed to fail.

Shifting our understanding from educated guesses and correlation to an underlying causal mechanism is profound.

Looking for correlations can help clue in on causation though

The answer was found in theory. The Japanese experimented relentlessly to learn the cause of manufacturing defects. If they could only identify the root cause of each and every problem, they believed, then they could design a process to prevent that error from recurring. In this way, manufacturing errors were rarely repeated, quality improved continuously, and costs declined precipitously. In short, what the Japanese proved is that in spite of inherent complexity, it is possible to reliably and efficiently produce quality cars, when you focus on improving the manufacturing process.

The Andon Cord

There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and in our metaphor we say that customers “hire” products or services to solve these

One thought experiment we’ve found helpful to really grasp a job is to imagine you are filming a minidocumentary of a person struggling to make progress in a specific circumstance.

John Doerr if Netflix was competing with Amazon. “Really we compete with everything you do to relax,” he told Doerr. “We compete with video games. We compete with drinking a bottle of wine. That’s a particularly tough one! We compete with other video networks. Playing board games.”

The table represented family. The life they had built together. “That was a ‘wow!’ moment for me,” he recalls. “I realized that was huge.” What was stopping buyers from making the decision to move was not something that the construction company had failed to offer, but rather the anxiety that came from giving up something that had profound meaning.

The people who hired Depend Silhouette incontinence products fired staying at home instead of risking going out. Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.

Loss aversion—people’s tendency to want to avoid loss—is twice as powerful psychologically as the allure of gains, as demonstrated by Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Think of it this way: the job has to have sufficient magnitude to cause people to change their behavior—“I’m struggling and I want a better solution than I can currently find”—but the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new.

New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.

All three layers—Uncovering the Job, Creating the Desired Experiences, and Integrating around the Job—are critical.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Something shifts. Even in some of the best companies, the Job to Be Done that brought them success in the first place can somehow get lost in the shuffle of running and growing the business. They define themselves in terms of products, not jobs. And that makes a very big difference.

When seen through a Jobs lens, V8 need not compete against Diet Coke and cappuccino. It can compete against vegetables!

The railroads were in trouble, Levitt wrote back in 1960, “because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”

But what feels like progress can prove to be poison if it leads managers to mistake the model of reality that active data offers for the real world.5 Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.

2. The Fallacy of Surface Growth When a company makes big investments in developing relationships with customers, natural incentives arise to find ways to sell more products to existing customers. The marginal cost of selling more products to existing customers is very small—and the profit is oh so alluring. We call this “surface growth.”

Enable distributed decision making with clarity of purpose—employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good jobs-focused decisions and to be autonomous and innovative. Align resources against what matters most—and free resources from what does not. Inspire people and unify your culture in service of what they care about most. Measure what matters most—customer progress, employee contributions, and incentives.

An organization explicitly focused on a clearly defined job enjoys four key benefits: Distributed decision making: Employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good decisions that align with the job, and to be autonomous and innovative. Resource optimization: The jobs focus shines a light on which resources are aligned against what matters most and which are not, and enables them to be rebalanced accordingly. Inspiration: Solving a customer’s job is inherently inspiring to individuals in an organization, as it enables them to see how their work enables real people to make progress in their lives. Better measurement: With a focus on the job, people will naturally seek to measure and manage to more customer-centric metrics.

A key goal in building a theory inductively is to develop one or more “constructs.” Constructs are rarely directly observable. Rather, a construct is an abstraction—quite often, a visualization that helps observers see how the phenomena interact with and change each other, over time. Whereas correlations reveal static relationships among the phenomena, a construct is a stepping-stone that helps us to see the dynamics of causality.

But all too often the husband doesn’t do the job very well. So she could hire friends and family to do the job, or her profession to do it. Or she could live her life without ever getting this job done well. We hope you will read this and think about the jobs you are being hired for in your life—and if you are performing them well. It might be a sobering exercise.