Competing Against Luck
CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, the author of eleven books, a five-time McKinsey Award winner for the best article in Harvard Business Review, and the cofounder of four firms, including the innovation consulting firm Innosight.
TADDY HALL is a Principal with The Cambridge Group and Leader of Nielsen's Breakthrough Innovation Project.
KAREN DILLON is a former Harvard Business Review editor and co-author of the New York Times best-selling books How Will You Measure Your Life and The HBR Guide to Office Politics.
DAVID S. DUNCAN is an Innosight senior partner. He is a thought leader and counselor to top leaders on innovation strategy and growth, assisting them in navigating disruptive change, creating sustainable growth, and transforming their companies to thrive over time.
The world's leading authority on innovation and growth delivers a game-changing book that every organization needs to change innovation from a game of chance to one in which they build goods and services that customers not only want to buy, but are prepared to pay a premium for.
How do businesses know how to expand? How can they design things that they are certain buyers will want to buy? Can innovation be more than a hit-or-miss proposition? Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, has the answer. Christensen's revolutionary thesis of disruptive innovation transformed business a generation ago. He now goes on to offer powerful fresh insights.
Christensen and his co-authors have arrived to one important conclusion after years of research: our long-held maxim—that understanding the consumer is the heart of innovation—is incorrect. Customers do not purchase goods or services; rather, they "hire" them to do a task. He contends that understanding customers does not lead to successful innovation. Understanding the jobs of customers helps. Some of the world's most respected organizations and fast-growing startups use the "Jobs to Be Done" method, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name a few. However, the purpose of this book is not to celebrate past triumphs, but to forecast future ones.
Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan argue that by understanding what motivates customers to "hire" a product or service, any company can enhance its innovation track record, generating goods that customers not only want to hire, but will pay a premium for. Jobs theory provides new optimism for growth to companies that have been discouraged by their hit-or-miss efforts.
Competing Against Luck meticulously lays out the authors' controversial framework, providing a thorough explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the actual world—and, most crucially, how not to waste the insights it delivers. The book is one of the best books on digital transformation.
Author: Clayton M. Christensen, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan and Taddy Hall
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 776 reviews)
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