With the lens of Jobs to Be Done, the Medtronic team and Innosight (including my coauthor David Duncan) started research afresh in India. The team visited hospitals and care facilities, interviewing m...
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 storybo...
What are the important, unsatisfied jobs in your own life, and in the lives of those closest to you? Flesh out the circumstances of these jobs, and the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of...
We adhere to the saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, while not really questioning whether it is broke.
Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.
To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organiza...
Throughout this book we will refer to jobs in shorthand, simplistic terms for ease of reference—but it’s important to emphasize that a well-defined job is multilayered and complex. And that is actuall...
They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with a...
Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low. This is the conclusion of a...
Planning Your Courses at the Schools of Experience If you think about McCall’s theory, going through the right courses in the schools of experience can help people in all kinds of situations increase...
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...
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It’s a profound insight—first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.1
One of the most vexing dilemmas that stable corporations face when they seek to rekindle growth by launching new businesses is that their internal schools of experience have offered precious few cours...
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.
If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.
Hence, because flash cards are being used in markets completely different from those Quantum and Seagate typically engage—palmtop computers, electronic clipboards, cash registers, electronic cameras,...
Harvard Business School alum Rick Krieger and some partners decided to start QuickMedx, the forerunner of CVS MinuteClinics, after Krieger spent a frustrating few hours waiting in an emergency room fo...
Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always d...
First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insigni...