Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

A key goal in building a theory inductively is to develop one or more “constructs.” Constructs are rarely directly observable. Rather, a construct is an abstraction—quite often, a visualization that helps observers see how the phenomena interact with and change each other, over time. Whereas correlations reveal static relationships among the phenomena, a construct is a stepping-stone that helps us to see the dynamics of causality. In chemistry, for example, Auguste Laurent’s (1807–1853) visualizations (constructs) of chemical compounds enabled him to explain how compounds arise and are transformed into other compounds. In economics, Adam Smith’s construct (1776) of an “invisible hand” helped explain how free markets work. Figuratively, the invisible hand allocates capital and labor to activities that bring prosperity, and it takes resources away from entities that waste them. It has helped billions of people understand how capitalism, properly structured, helps mankind. In the theory of disruption, the key to defining the essence of disruption was being able to visualize trajectories of how technological progress and market needs interact. Why this diversion into the role of constructs in theories? The term “job” is a construct. It fits exactly the definition of what a construct is, and the role it plays in the Jobs to Be Done Theory. Understanding jobs as a construct involved carefully defining the terms that I needed to communicate what I had been seeing. The terms “hire...

The Theory of Jobs has evolved a lot over the last two decades. Without intending to do it, but in the course of trying to help many different people with many different problems, I have been stunned by how broadly and deeply the Theory of Jobs can be used. Almost every day I become aware of an interesting new example of Jobs Theory in action. My daughter Katie recently regaled me with details of Drybar, a salon in which you can get only one service: a perfect “blowout” for your hair—along with the attendant experiences that help you prepare for a special night out and make you feel good about yourself while you’re there. (I had no idea such things were coveted, but I stand duly corrected.) In just a few years, Drybar has become a visible success in cities around the country. And at the other end of the spectrum, I recently had the pleasure of discussing Jobs Theory with a four-star Air Force general grappling with challenges of motivating and retaining top personnel in an era of government budget constraints. When he left my office, it was as if he saw his dilemma in an entirely new light—one that provided some hope. “Never in my wildest imagination would I have guessed that a story about milk shakes would change the way I thought about recruiting in the military,” he declared as we parted company. It’s a challenging problem he faces, but I hope Jobs Theory offers him the perspective to make a difference. These are just a few examples that come quickly to mind from recent...

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...

In 2009 I teamed with another of my terrific former students, Jason Hwang (now cofounder and chief medical officer of Icebreaker Health), to write The Innovator’s Prescription5—a book to explore why the cost of our health care system increases at an unsustainable rate, even as accessibility declines. Again, a key for unlocking this dilemma has been the Jobs to Be Done Theory. For example, the job of most people is that they want to be so healthy that they don’t even have to think about health. Yet, in systems where the providers of care are reimbursed for services they provide, they actually make money when the members of their system get sick—it’s effectively “sick care” rather than “health care.” When the members are healthy, the providers make little. In other words, the Jobs to Be Done of members and providers are not aligned in the US health care system. At some health care providers, such as Intermountain Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, and Geisinger Health System, managers are aggressively working to align the jobs of providers and the consumers in their care. One of the most important ways they do this is by assuming responsibility for the cost of care—by insuring consumers, for instance. The organizations’ financial sustainability therefore depends on keeping consumers as healthy as possible over the course of their relationship with providers; and this dependency enables jobs-focused innovation around disease prevention, and care efficiency and effectiveness, to f...