Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

“We were frustrated and struggling with our inability to grow,” he says now, “and focusing on the Jobs to Be Done felt like a no-brainer.” What had to change at SNHU as a consequence? “Pretty much everything,” LeBlanc recalls, and on two different tracks corresponding to the two distinct jobs. Instead of the second-class-citizen status the online portion of the university had been given since its inception, LeBlanc and his leadership team made it their focus. They moved the small online recruitment and administration team two miles away to new offices in a former mill yard in Manchester—a classic “disruptor” positioning that allowed the online team to grow unfettered by the physical and structural limitations of the traditional university policies and procedures. Then LeBlanc and his team led a session of about twenty of the top online faculty and administrators and charted out the entire admissions process—from first inquiry to first class—on a whiteboard. “It looked like a schematic from a nuclear submarine!” he says. The team circled all the hurdles that SNHU was throwing up—or not helping to overcome—in that process, with an eye toward the unique job of online learners, their unique circumstances, and the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the job that were important to them. And then, one by one, they eliminated those hurdles and replaced them with experiences that would perfectly satisfy this job. There were literally dozens and dozens of decisions that ...