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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.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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9e97a93
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By contrast, one company that clearly understands the stakes is Uber. In the last several years, few companies have captured the media's attention like Uber. In my opinion, Uber has been successful because it's perfectly nailed a Job to Be Done. Yes, Uber can often offer a nice car to take you from point A to point B, but that's not where it's built its competitive advantage. The experiences that come with hiring Uber to solve customers' Jo..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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4ed5e2b
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Processes are invisible from a customer's standpoint--but the results of those processes are not. Processes can profoundly affect whether a customer chooses your product or service in the long run. And they may be a company's best bet to ensure that the customer's job, and not efficiency or productivity, remains the focal point for innovation in the long run. Absence of a process, as is the case with most traditional hospitals, is actually ..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6e5ed51
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That's a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses its advice in "if-then" statements."
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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People hired milk shakes for two very different jobs during the day, in two very different circumstances. Each job has a very different set of competitors--in the morning it was bagels and protein bars and bottles of fresh juice, for example; in the afternoon, milk shakes are competing with a stop at the toy store or rushing home early to shoot a few hoops--and therefore was being evaluated as the best solution according to very different c..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6ee818b
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What are they really trying to accomplish and why isn't what they're doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new? One simple way to think about these questions is through storyboarding. Talk to consumers as if you're capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later. Pixar has this down to a science: as you piece together your customers' struggle, you can literally sketch out their story: Once upon a time . . . ..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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10dedd1
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Most of the world's most successful innovators see problems through a different lens from the rest of us. Why didn't Hertz come up with a Zipcar-like product first? Kodak came close to creating a kind of Facebook product long before Mark Zuckerberg did. Major yogurt manufacturers understood that there might be a demand for Greek yogurt well before Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya launched what is now a $ 1 billion business. AT& T introduced a ..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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To understand how revolutionary Pasteur's contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession believed that four different bodily fluids--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile--dominated the health and moods of people. When they were in harmony, all was right with the world. When they were out of sync, people fell ill or into "bad..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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As long as Toyota is continually identifying "anomalies" in the manufacturing process, every single defect is seen as an opportunity to make the process better. There are, in effect, a set of rules that ensure that this happens. For example, an employee must never add value to a part until it is ready to be used in the next step of adding value. It must be done in the same way, every time. That way managers know, definitely, that the value-..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that good theory is what has been missing in the discussions about how companies can create successful innovations. Is innovation truly a crapshoot? Or is innovation difficult because we don't know what causes it to succeed? I've watched so many smart, capable managers wrestle with all kinds of innovation challenges and nagging questions, but seldom the most fundamental one: What causes a customer..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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What could happen if we changed our emphasis from push to pull? What if much more of the $143 billion spent on official development assistance in 2016 was channeled to support direct market-creation efforts in poor countries, even when the circumstances seemed unlikely? Imagine how many markets could be created; imagine how many Tolarams, Nollywoods, M-PESAs, and other new-market creators could emerge; imagine how many jobs could be created..
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Clayton M Christensen |
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And that's the trap of marginal thinking. You can see the immediate costs of investing, but it's really hard to accurately see the costs of not investing. When you decide that the upside of investing in the new product isn't substantial enough while you still have a perfectly acceptable existing product, you aren't taking into account a future in which somebody else brings the new product to market. You're assuming everything else--specific..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don't face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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Innovators were simply much more likely to question, observe, network, and experiment compared to typical executives. We published the results of our research in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal,
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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Correlation is enough," 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A's unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer da..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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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 ..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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WHEN YOU WERE ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut. Archaeologist. Fireman. Baseball player. The first female president of the United States. Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits. There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that's truly meaningful to them. But for ma..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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The safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. --C. S. Lewis
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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2215060
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But the better you are at asking the right questions, engaging in the right observations, eliciting ideas and feedback through networking with the right people, and running experiments, the less likely you are to fail.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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5b00f03
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So Medtronic adjusted not only its marketing efforts, but also the services it provided to directly target potential patients. For example, in conjunction with local cardiologists, Medtronic organized heart-health screening clinics across the country--providing prospective patients with free, direct access to specialists and high-tech equipment without having to go through an overwhelmed GP first. The question of paying for a pacemaker and ..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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Data is not the phenomenon. It represents the phenomenon, but not very well.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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On the surface, the Mayo Clinic is organized around the specialties of the doctors, like many other health organizations. But really, the main organizing principle is a process to get the right things in the right sequence to get the job done. When you think of the word "process" you might instantly conjure images of a manufacturing assembly line or a bureaucratic standard. But processes touch everything about the way an organization transf..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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In a small, independent organization, these small wins will generate energy and enthusiasm. In the mainstream, they would generate skepticism about whether we should even be in the business. I want my organization's customers to answer the question of whether we should be in the business. I don't want to spend my precious managerial energy constantly defending our existence to efficiency analysts in the mainstream.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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As difficult as it may seem, you've got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. That thinking can be dangerous. You're only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: "What am I doing with my life?"
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6cb6d3b
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We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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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?"
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me--but rather from what they didn't do for me.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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The logic is, for example, "I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn't as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That's when I'll focus on my family." Guess what. By that time the game is already over."
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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8659a7c
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Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment--but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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No, you can't stay up late. No, you can't have a dog!" I recognized that I was one of those dads, searching for a moment to connect with my children. I'd been looking for something innocuous to which I could say "yes"--so I can feel like a kind and loving dad. So I'm standing there in line with my son in the late afternoon and I order my meal. Then my son pauses to look up at me, like only a son can, and asks, "Dad, can I have a milk shake,..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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b13e6eb
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I think [the Vista fiasco] will allow [Apple] to survive for a bit longer.
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Clayton M. Christensen |