Competing Against Luck

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

Read January 2017

The output of twenty plus years of research, Competing Against Luck, outlines the Jobs to Be Done theory. Published in September of 2016, the authors take you through the development of the theory, how and where to use it, and most importantly, when it is not appropriate to use. A straight forward read, with many research examples to building the case for Jobs Theory.

One paragraph summary

One of those rare books that come along and describes something so obvious that you wonder how it had not been documented before. Clayton Christensen et al, describe the “Jobs Theory” for innovation. The core tenet of this theory is that people are not so much looking for problems to be solved but that people pull products into their lives to “make progress on a job that needs to be done in a particular circumstance”. Clayton has been very specific in his use of language here, and every word has meaning. When you look at innovation through the “lens of Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Jobs to Be Done.”