Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

As many of the executives we interviewed have told us, when you hit upon a job, it just makes intuitive sense. It feels true. A genuine insight, as neuromarketing expert Gerald Zaltman, a colleague at Harvard Business School, says, is a thought that is experienced as true on conception. When you have an insight, you don’t have to convince yourself that it’s important or powerful. You just know. The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed. But as our next chapter will illustrate, uncovering a Job to Be Done is only the first step. You are selling progress, not products. In order to create a solution that customers actually want to hire—and hire repeatedly—you have to see the full context of customers’ Jobs to Be Done and the obstacles that get in their way.