Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

By contrast, consider recent success stories like OpenTable, Salesforce.com, Airbnb, or enduring successes such as craigslist or IKEA. Each of these businesses is very clearly organized around a distinct Job to Be Done and each has enjoyed sustained success with minimal competition. It’s a totally different game. This is not a new phenomenon. 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.