Intellectually Curious - Edition 14

Welcome to the 14th Edition of the Intellectually Curious Newsletter. I would like to thank all the subscribers and for those who are visiting for the first time do take time to read the previous editions and subscribe so that you don’t miss the future editions.

Book for the edition:

There are so many books about Strategy, Innovation and various theories about how we can formulate a successful strategy and have an organisation that keeps growing. Not many of them get it right. There are so many factors that contribute towards an organization’s success and many of these books pick up one of the factors of the success and then expand on them. That is the reason we see many of these companies that were once big names and were examples of the case studies in those books have now completely disappeared. ?In that way we can say that these companies were just plain lucky. I am sure you can think of so many of them.

Another important misconception that we all have is Innovation means a product or a service.

This is the book that can help in making organization’s rethink the way they are innovating. This book was released in 2016 and I am surprised about how the concept that this book details out still makes sense. The book that I am referring to is Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen.

This book introduced the Theory of Jobs to be done and it makes the case for how an organisation can be successful without depending on luck.

Most of the companies in 2024 have access to better technologies, they are able to store great amount of data and they think their data analytics will give them the breakthrough. They have huge armies of data scientists churning out some insights or the other giving an illusion of progress and many are still correlations and not explaining the causality.

According to Prof. Clayton Christensen, Innovation means making progress and it can be made predictable. To achieve this he proposes the theory of Jobs to be done. This theory focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right set of solution and experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ problem well, every time. So the better question to ask your customer is? - “What job did you hire the product or service to do ?”. If we start understanding our customers jobs in this manner the strategy that one can create need not depend on luck anymore.

This book is one of the seminal work of Prof. Christensen as he improvised from his earlier theory of Disruption that provided a framework for an organisation to address threats and opportunities. He felt that disruption theory didn’t not address some key questions like how a company should innovate, where it should look for opportunities and what products and services that customers will want to buy. He admits that is a theory that came out of data and that was its limitations.

The theory of Jobs to be done explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives. This gives a very clear causal reasoning of why someone uses a specific product or a service.

The fundamental question that we need to ask is what causes or will cause, a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?

A Job according to this book is the progress that a person trying to make in a particular circumstance. It is always movement towards a progress or aspiration. From the perspective of Jobs they are always specific to a context and influence how we make progress and define the circumstance in which the job is hired. A job is also defined by its social and emotional dimensions.

The big difference this theory brings in compared with most of the other theories on Innovation is that the customer’s jobs to be done is at the center of the Innovation universe and not the customer and this is a very radical departure from how Innovation is thought about even now in 2024.

Interestingly one of the biggest problem with any innovation project is to determine if we are succeeding or not and stopping at the right time. In the case of an innovation that is starting from Jobs to be done theory, companies can apply a tool called discovery driven planning and by doing so they can quickly check if their hypothesis is working or not and make adjustments or stop the project.

When a customer wants to hire a product or a service to get a specific job to be done during a specific circumstances, there are always competing solutions. So our solution should be something that is able to overcome those competition and capture the mind of the customer.

A job is always expressed in verbs and nouns with the right level of abstraction to ensure that we can apply this theory of jobs to be done. This will help us to understand and explain what causes what to happen.

So how do we identify these jobs ? The authors offer 5 ways to uncover the jobs that maybe hiding in plain sight:

1. Finding a job close to home: Understanding unresolved issues in your life is a good place to look for Jobs to be done – good examples – Khan academy – Jobs to be done – Teaching your niece mathematics and then finding that several millions of kids and adults around the world need to be taught basics in a simple manner that is easy to understand; It is not just something that you face personally, you can always observe your family, neighbors, friends etc and identify the unresolved jobs.
2. Competing with Nothing: Where consumers don’t find anything to their liking and they just do nothing about it – The book refers to a phenomenal example from Southern New Hampshire University – who created a simple and easy way for adult late life learners to enroll to the university and graduate successfully.
3. Workarounds and compensating behaviors: ING Direct allowing creation of savings accounts for children to save their presents and pocket money and it is because other banks were segmenting their customers and ING Direct was focusing on getting the Jobs to be done completed.
4. Look for what people don’t want to do: These are called negative jobs – CVS Minute clinic in US that eliminated the long waiting time at the emergency room for routine ailments; In India, the spread of home cleaning services is another good example – I do not want to spend time cleaning my own home, these agencies come and get the job done.
5. Unusual uses: Observing how your customers use your products in a way that is completely different from what your company envisioned – Cold remedies that are available over the counter that has been used by many as a way to get a good night sleep; In India an untapped example is way people use two-wheelers to carry huge amounts of goods.

The above methods give a good idea to the marketers start understanding customers from a Jobs to be done perspective and not product or customer segmentation. Then the potential size of the markets just explodes and suddenly growth is discovered.

Now that we understand what is the Jobs to be done theory, what is a job and how to identify one, how to understand jobs from our customers without them saying anything is also crucial. Whenever a customer wants to use your products/services to fulfil a job they have at hand, two opposing forces act – forces compelling the change and forces that oppose the change. So jobs to be done solutions should have the sufficient magnitude to force a change.

So when you apply this theory, we need to get the full picture of the progress that a customer is trying to make under particular circumstances including the competing needs and relative priorities. The book has a transcript of an interview that was done with someone who bought a mattress, which is very insightful into what goes in someone’s mind when they are buying something. Once you read it, you will think why there are no sleep experts in a mattress showroom.

The jobs theory also provides the depth that you need to travel to uncover key insights. Always remember that to hire your product for the job to be done at a particular circumstance, the customer is firing something else. Understanding that opens up better opportunities especially if your product/service is the one that customer is firing.

To innovate on the job that you have uncovered, you need to create Job spec once you understand the jobs to be done clearly – what is that we need to design, develop and deliver in my new product/service that solves the customer’s job well ? This helps you in making sure that customer is hiring you again and again.

Uber is a perfect example of a job spec that has been designed, developed and delivered to perfection – the experience of summoning a cab when I want, the cab will reach me in few minutes where I am and I am made comfortable about my own safety with information about the driver who is coming to pick me up based on his/her rating. Uber is now synonymous with taxi’s and consumers are not looking for other modes of transport when they want to hire a service to reach where they want to go.

FedEx is another such brand that has become synonymous with the job that it has been developed to service. These brands are called purpose brands.

Many companies don’t understand this and they think they can capture the market by making their product better and better.

Companies that are built around the job also have great integrating processes that are built to get the job done and deliver ideal experience and generate competitive advantage for themselves.? That is the main reason many copycat brands are not able to sustain as they are able to copy the product/service but not the core processes that are built around the job.

Processes are critical part of the unspoken culture of the organisation. Toyota used to open its doors to all its competitors to come and observe how they make cars and also to interact with employees and have a Q&A session. Toyota was never worried about giving away its secret sauce as it was safe in terms of its complex, unspoken processes that no one could grasp during those visits. So when Toyota’s competitors come back and deploy the Toyota production system in their organisation, it fails as they don’t have the same culture as Toyota.

Now when a company is focused on customers jobs to be done, their employees have clear North star of what needs to be done and also contribute to the overall innovation process and also making the customers life easy. This ensures that team is focused on customer’s job and not on the revenue. By focusing on the customers’ jobs to be done they ensure that revenue is generated. And these employees also know when to make the policy flexible. We all have heard about how some hotel chain employees go overboard to make their customers experience fantastic and how we all have experienced pathetic hotel staff who just go by their job description and not by the customers job.

And when the second type of companies that are not having processes around customers job, start optimizing their processes you start seeing issues like basic needs disappearing from your hotel room and you need to call someone who never fulfills your need. So these companies keep getting better at doing the wrong things exceptionally well.

Once a company identify the customers’ job to be done and start growing, it is easy to lose sight of why the customer even hired you with wrong metrics and running behind data.

This happens due to 3 fallacies:

1. The fallacy of active versus passive data – Data that we get is always an abstraction of reality. They start managing numbers and never the context behind the numbers. The context is called passive data and it is dismissed by many senior leaders by saying that it is not analytical. You can observe this in the daily operations of the organisation.
2. The fallacy of surface growth: Companies on tasting success start to sell more products to existing customers and by doing so they start diluting the customers job that got them their success.
3. The fallacy of confirming data: Seeing only data that confirms their point of view. Sherlock Holmes said “There is nothing more deceptive than the obvious fact”.

Even machine generated data has a context and not understanding that has been the undoing of many organisations. In the name of being analytical many leaders keep ignoring the context behind every data point.

As we have seen if an organisation is focused on the customers job to be done then all the employees of the organisation work towards and innovate to make their customers jobs much easier to do and make it the company’s culture.

It is like understanding the commander’s intent in the military – the rank and file knows what their commander wants and are not looking towards their commanders every time they need to make choices.

The strategy of employing your resources and priorities become simple thing to all the employees of the organisation when they always ask the question – are we fulfilling our customers’ job to be done ?

Driving efficiency is a need of the hour, but any attempt to drive efficiency that is not aligned with creating customer value by helping to get their jobs done will ensure the organisation slowly moving towards failure.

Always remember what, Ted Levitt the legendary Harvard marketing professor's most famous insight – Customers don’t want your product they want solutions to their problems.

This is a book that is a must read for everyone who dreams of starting on their own, so that you can identify the right job for which your customer has hired your product or service.

Recent Technology Trend:

How AI is disrupting customer support:

https://amritaroy.substack.com/p/ai-is-disrupting-customer-support

Something new to learn:

Can butterflies fly 4200 Kms - ?

https://www.wired.com/story/butterflies-fly-4200-kilometers-without-stopping-nonstop-migration-painted-lady/

Podcast episode of this Newsletter:

Superhuman AI is near – Bill Gates:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-gates-says-superhuman-ai-may-be-closer-than-you-think/id1482067226?i=1000660411293

Hope you enjoyed this edition!

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