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    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Audiobook7 hours

    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

    Written by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan

    Narrated by John Pruden

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.

    How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.

    After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they ""hire"" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The ""Jobs to Be Done"" approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones.

    Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to ""hire"" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.

    This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9780062565112
    Author

    Clayton M. Christensen

    CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN (1952–2020) was the Kim B. Clark Professor at Harvard Business School, the author of nine books, a five-time recipient of the McKinsey Award for Harvard Business Review’s best article, and the cofounder of four companies, including the innovation consulting firm Innosight. In 2011 and 2013 he was named the world’s most influential business thinker in a biennial ranking conducted by Thinkers50.

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    Reviews for Competing Against Luck

    4.5/5

    143 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Jobs to be done are the way to improve tyou business and if you don't do this you will fail. That is half the book and it bothers me. It seems desperate because it is too much and repetitive. I would even say this tiring approach gets in the way of the job I am trying to get done while reading the book.

      The other half is great. I love the jtbd way of thinking. Ive also read a few HBR articles about it and the following books:

      You'll find an interview about the buying process of a mattress at Cotsco that helps you uncover what jobs are getting done. I've learned a lot with that.

      You'll learn the in depth importance of concepts like:

      Big hire (download an app)
      small hire (use an app, engage over time with it).
      One size fits none (different jobs require different solutions, sometimes a subtle change to the context implies big changes to the job getting done).

      How to build detailed narratives the shed light on the jobs to be done.

      How to analyze competing solutions, tradeoffs and obstacles.

      The concept of pushing an unsatisfied job and pulling a new solution

      Inside your company: Dealing with entrenched processes, decision making and prioritiation. – You'll find plenty of The Innovators dilemma concepts here.

      Employees autonomy and job centered decision making that aligns individuals across the company. –Same approach of main customer experience authors.

      As the reading goes on you'll start to relate its content with some of Jeanne Bliss conceptss and the HBR article: . That made me realize that the jobs view is actually a similar way of planning the experiences your product creates. Think tools like customer journeys, empathy maps, context mapping, storyboarding,

      The jobs concept main difference seems to be a laser focus on context and circumstances which makes jbtd more dynamic than a traditional customer experiences perspective.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Lots of great examples and case studies for inspiration, but not that detailed on how to apply jtbd theory.
    • 5/5
      Very insightful and game-changing without trying to. I’m reading it again, only this time slower so that I can implement the insights into my life and my career..
    • 4/5
      Excellent book, offers new methodology to approach innovation. It does take patience to get the idea
    • 5/5
      This book has been “sitting” on my shelf for years but it was the Audiobook that made me connect with it and appreciate the substantive world of “jobs to be done” that Clayton Christensen endeavored to unlock for all of us !!
    • 3/5
      Christiansen has distilled things nicely here, however Christensen's complete method in this book was more fully explained with Xerox PARC examples in GLOBAL QUALITY, chapter 20 published by McGraw Hill, 1993 written by Richard Tabor Greene---the LINK for purchase from Amazon is www.amazon.com/Richard-Tabor-Greene/
    • 5/5
      The theory of jobs is kinda like the “first principles” concept that Peter Thiel refers to in his book “Zero to One”. So in that sense, Clayton Christensen is on the same level as Thiel … in terms of a basic concept. But what jobs theory does is unpack the “How” of first principles in great detail that is incredibly helpful. This truly is a book about how you can take luck out of the equation when it comes to innovation. In that sense, jobs theory is a huge paradigm shift. This is not to say that it is easy. But it is to say that it is very very useful.
    • 3/5
      Hire this book if you're looking to add to your understanding of Jobs To Be Done.

      The topic, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), has relatively little material available, given its potential impact. Jobs To Be Done is arguably as important if not a more important shift in thinking than Disruptive Innovation, especially for product development and customer happiness.

      The anecdotes were insightful and varied, especially valuable for those in established industries. There are concepts, like little hires and competing against nothing, that will be useful and relevant to online businesses, as well as the realm of physical products. I would love to see those developed in a future book. The takeaways and questions for leaders at the end of each chapter will help busy readers let the main ideas stick.