Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

As Ted Levitt pointed out in the pages of Harvard Business Review decades ago, the railroad industry did not decline because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That need actually grew, but cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones stepped in to handle that job nicely. 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.”4 In other words, the railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do. They organized and tracked and measured themselves as if they were in the business of selling drills, not quarter-inch holes.

In discovering an unfilled or poorly done job, managers are surrounded by nonconsumption and workarounds.

Making meaning out of the jumble of real-life experiences is not about tabulating data but about assembling the narrative that reveals the Job to Be Done.

However, when the job has a voice in an organization, individual work streams have meaning and employees understand why their work matters. A well-articulated job provides a kind of “commander’s intent,” obviating the need for micromanagement because employees at all levels understand and are motivated by how the work they do fits into a larger process to help customers get their jobs done.

“Too often we’d go look at what customers were asking for and build it.” But absent a clear understanding of the job the customers were hiring that product to do, “there was simply no way to differentiate which features were the right ones. It’s like navigating without a compass.”

A leader has to count on employees up and down the company’s ranks to make the right choices in everyday decisions. Those choices will determine a company’s real strategy. As we discussed earlier, the way an organization’s employees work together toward common goals is the basis of its culture. 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.

The advantage of this is that it causes an organization to become self-managing.

Clear individual responsibilities and defined processes are a simple necessity as an antidote to chaos.

When you see numerical data, remember that it was created by people: individuals or groups of people who decide which elements of the phenomena they include in published data and which they overlook and destroy. Hence, data reflects bias.