Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

If they work together with a focus on the Job to Be Done, a culture will emerge that reinforces that job and stays deeply connected to it. If that culture has formed around the job, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

But those instincts aren’t formed overnight. Rather, they are the result of shared learning—of employees working together to solve problems and figuring out what works. As long as the way they have chosen keeps working to solve a problem, the culture will coalesce and become an internal set of rules and guidelines that employees in the company will draw upon in making the choices ahead of them. The advantage of this is that it causes an organization to become self-managing. Managers don’t need to enforce the rules. They understand the “commander’s intent”—a military term that explains why soldiers up and down the ranks know how to make the right choices absent a specific order. They are clear on the commander’s goals and priorities. Business leaders need to ensure that employees everywhere in the company make the right choices every day without requiring constant supervision.

A clearly defined job spec that everyone understands can serve the same purpose—a focal point for employees to make the right decisions without being told specifically what to do each time. Absent a specific directive, employees know how to balance the tradeoffs that necessarily come with any new initiative. What’s most important? What can’t we compromise on? What’s the ultimate goal? What’s my role in achieving that ultimate goal? Jobs Theory provides you with the right set of lenses to make everyday choices that connect to the jobs you are solving in customers’ lives. Jobs Theory provides a language of integration, whereby marketers, engineers, salespeople, and customer service employees can communicate with each other, rather than talk past one another.

“Improving customers’ lives” didn’t translate into a single piece of data that Intuit was already capturing. But it was possible to measure whether Intuit was providing the experiences in purchase and use that its customers were seeking in hiring Intuit software.

“customer backward” innovation process, those three measures are monitored on a minute-by-minute basis.

A successful start-up is typically organized around the job, which tends to make it look like a small group of people each wearing multiple hats and sharing an understanding for what the entity is delivering that enables the customer to make progress. In short, the organizing unit in a start-up is the customer’s job.

Functional oversight and efficiency is a requirement of competitive markets. However, efficiency is only value creating when it is in the performance of a process that is creating customer value by fulfilling a high-priority job. Successful organizations pursue operational efficiency without compromising the customer Job to Be Done.