Competing Against Luck
Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan · 2016
Competing Against Luck (2016) is a book by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan on business & strategy. Harvard's Clayton Christensen unveils Jobs to Be Done theory: customers don't buy products, they hire them to make progress. A causal framework that makes innovation predictable instead of a game of luck.
The book that turns innovation from a lottery into a discipline, by revealing the one question every winning product answers: what job did the customer hire it to do?
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Competing Against Luck pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- A **Job to Be Done** is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular **circumstance**, and it always has **functional, social, and emotional** dimensions. Nail the whole job, not just the functional features, and you become nearly impossible to copy.
- **Customers don't buy products; they hire them to do a job**, and when a better candidate appears, they fire the old one. Your real competition is defined by the job, not your product category: a milkshake competes with bananas, bagels, and boredom, not other milkshakes.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Milkshake Dilemma
- Progress, Not Products
- Jobs in the Wild: Southern New Hampshire and American Girl
- Correlation Is Not Causation
- The Four Forces That Drive Every Switch
- Hearing What Customers Don't Say
- Building the Right Experiences
- Integrating Around the Job
Finish Competing Against Luck tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
More on business & strategy
-
Contagious Jonah Berger Turns "going viral" from luck into engineering, giving you six repeatable levers that make ideas, products, and messages spread by… -
Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull Pixar's co-founder reveals that protecting creativity isn't about hiring geniuses, it's about relentlessly hunting the hidden… -
Great by Choice Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen A rigorously researched answer to the question that haunts every leader: why do some companies thrive in chaos while equally… -
High Output Management Andrew S. Grove The original operating manual for managers, written by the Intel CEO who treated management as a measurable production process… -
Hooked Nir Eyal The definitive playbook for how habit-forming products get built, a four-step loop that turns first-time users into daily… -
In Search of Excellence Tom Peters & Robert H. Waterman Jr. The book that killed the cold, number-crunching view of management and proved that America's best companies win through people…