Competing Against Luck Quotes

“None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable. If”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“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.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can predict, in advance, customers will be eager to hire. Leave relying on luck to the other guys.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck

“Here’s one example to illustrate the point. When a smoker takes a cigarette break, on one level he’s simply seeking the nicotine his body craves. That’s the functional dimension. But that’s not all that’s going on. He’s hiring cigarettes for the emotional benefit of calming him down, relaxing him. And if he works in a typical office building, he’s forced to go outside to a designated smoking area. But that choice is social, too—he can take a break from work and hang around with his buddies. From this perspective, people hire Facebook for many of the same reasons. They log onto Facebook during the middle of the workday to take a break from work, relax for a few minutes while thinking about other things, and convene around a virtual water cooler with far-flung friends. In some ways, Facebook is actually competing with cigarettes to be hired for the same Job to Be Done. Which the smoker chooses will depend on the circumstances of his struggle in that particular moment.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes. But to do all this well takes a holistic”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Before a customer hires any new product, you have to understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours. Companies don’t think about this enough. Something always needs to get fired.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Deity does not create data and then bestow it upon mankind. All data is man-made. Somebody, at some point, decided what data to collect, how to organize it, how to present it, and how to infer meaning from it—and it embeds all kinds of false rigor into the process. Data has the same agenda as the person who created it, wittingly or unwittingly. For all the time that senior leaders spend analyzing data, they should be making equal investments to determine what data should be created in the first place.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck

“Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“American Girl dolls are nice. But they aren’t amazing. In recent years Toys“ R” Us, Walmart, and even Disney have all tried to challenge American Girl’s success with similar dolls (Journey Girls, My Life, and Princess & Me)—at a fraction of the price—but to date, no one has made a dent. American Girl is able to command a premium price because it’s not really selling dolls. It’s selling an experience. When you see a company that has a product or service that no one has successfully copied, like American Girl, rarely is it the product itself that is the source of the long-term competitive advantage, something American Girl founder Pleasant Rowland understood. “You’re not trying to just get the product out there, you hope you are creating an experience that will do the job perfectly,” says Rowland. You’re creating experiences that, in effect, make up the product’s résumé: “Here’s why you should hire me.” That’s why American Girl has been so successful for so long, in spite of numerous attempts by competitors to elbow in. My wife, Christine, and I were willing to splurge on the dolls because we understood what they stood for. American Girl dolls are about connection and empowering self-belief—and the chance to savor childhood just a bit longer. I have found that creating the right set of experiences around a clearly defined job—and then organizing the company around delivering those experiences (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter)—almost inoculates you against disruption. Disruptive competitors almost never come with a better sense of the job. They don’t see beyond the product.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time. “Theory” may conjure up images of ivory tower musings, but I assure you that it is the most practical and useful business tool we can offer you. Good theory helps us understand “how” and “why.” It helps us make sense of how the world works and predict the consequences of our decisions and our actions. Jobs Theory5, we believe, can move companies beyond hoping that correlation is enough to the causal mechanism of successful innovation. Innovation may never be a perfect science, but that’s not the point. We have the ability to make innovation a reliable engine for growth, an engine based on a clear understanding of causality, rather than simply casting seeds in the hopes of one day harvesting some fruit.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Perhaps our salespeople are largely focused on mattress features and the deal. Should we think about staffing our stores with “sleep” experts rather than mattress experts—”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Jobs Theory helps innovators identify the full picture of the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances, including the complex set of competing needs and relative priorities. You have to understand not only what customers want to hire, but what they’ll need to fire to make room for the new solution. All that context matters profoundly.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Kendi yaşamınızdaki çözülmemiş görevleri anlamak inovasyon için verimli bir zemin oluşturacaktır.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Inovasyonda Ustalasmak

“The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“What Is a Job? To summarize, the key features of our definition are: A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance. Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions. Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones. Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work—not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends. Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“That work led to my theory of disruptive innovation,1 which explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost have become the status quo—eventually completely redefining the industry.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“It’s assumed that ‘user experience’ is all about a beautiful screen and making sure the buttons are in all the right places. But that has almost nothing to do with getting the experience of using the software right—in the real world where clinicians use it. You can’t do design requirements in a conference room. You have to get out in the wild and live it.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“But what feels like progress can prove to be poison if it leads managers to mistake the model of reality that active data offers for the real world.5 Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth

“There is a second very important lesson in the Amazon story: there is a degree of ambidextrousness that enables processes to be both highly efficient and flexible. Jobs are not flexible—they have existed for years and years, even centuries. But how we solve for jobs varies over time. The important thing is to be attached to the job, but not the way we solve it today. Processes must flex over time when a better understanding of customer jobs calls for a revised orientation. Otherwise you’ll risk changing the concept of the job to fit the process, rather than the other way around.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice – Christensen's Jobs Theory for Startups and Business Growth