Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

In 2010 Michael Horn, one of my brightest former students and now a leading voice in the national discussion of the future of education, and I published Disrupting Class3—an inquiry into why our public schools struggle to improve. Improving schools is a very complicated problem, of course. As we mentioned earlier in this book, one of the most important insights we conveyed in Disrupting Class came when we put on the Theory of Jobs lenses and explored what the job is that students are trying to do. We concluded that school is not a job that children are trying to do. School is one of the things that children might hire to do the job. But the job is that children need to feel successful—every day. And they need friends—every day. Sure, I could hire school to do these jobs. But I could drop out of school and hire a gang to feel successful and have friends. Or I could drop out of school, get a minimum wage job to earn some money, and buy a car—and cruise around the neighborhood with my friends. Most schools don’t do this job well at all. Instead, most children feel failure when they go to class. They could also hire athletics to do the job. For a few, sports do the job well. But for the less gifted, athletics makes students feel failure, too. So they hire electronic games to feel successful. And yet for many, even such games yield failure. So they hire friends who have feelings of failure, too—and engage in drugs and other things to feel successful. I was heartened to learn re...