"other. As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--But Some Don't, points out, "ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagen-Dazs." Of course, it's no surprise that correlation isn't the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don't think they act as if there is a difference. They're comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. But correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation--the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause. Instead, they focus on how they can make their products better, more profitable, or differentiated from the competition. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: "If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do? For me, this is a neat idea. 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. Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (" pass the time while waiting in line"), some are big (" find a more fulfilling career"). Some surface unpredictably (" dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase"), some regularly (" pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school"). Other times we know they're coming. When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done. I might, for example, choose to buy the New York Times because I have a job to fill my time while waiting for a doctor's appointment and I don't want to read the boring magazines available in the lobby. Or perhaps because I'm a basketball fan and it's March Madness time. It's only when a job arises in my life that the Times can solve for me that I'll choose to hire the paper to do it. Or perhaps I have it delivered to my door so that my neighbors think I'm informed--and nothing about their ZIP code or median household income will tell the Times that either."