The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
by Jim Kalbach · 6 Apr 2020
the label “job to be done” in any consequential way to refer to their ideas or approaches to solving business problems. It wasn’t until Clayton Christensen popularized the term in The Innovator’s Solution, the follow-up to his landmark work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, that the concept became widespread. Although
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prioritized with a quantitative survey. ODI increases the adoption of innovation by creating products that address unmet needs. MILKSHAKE MARKETING REVISITED Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen often frames JTBD with a story involving milkshakes. He and his team were reportedly working with McDonald’s to understand how to improve milkshake sales
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first to use the term “job to be done” in conjunction with what he called a “process need,” or objective that people wanted to accomplish. Clayton Christensen is universally credited with popularizing the concept of JTBD. But divergent schools of thought have divided the field into two camps. On one side is
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have developed over the last 30 years of JTBD research and practice. TABLE 1.1 COMPARING DEFINITIONS OF A JOB TO BE DONE SOURCE DEFINITION Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck (New York: HarperBusiness, 2016) “A job to be done is your customers’ struggle for
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into higher-order goals, generally called laddering. In JTBD work, the principle of laddering applies as well. For instance, in his book Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen points to “big jobs,” or things that have a big impact on our lives (like finding a new career) and “little jobs,” or things that
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, 2016, https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/podcast-bob-moesta-on-jobs-to-be-done/ Moesta is a pioneer in JTBD and directly influenced by Clayton Christensen. In this interview with Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom and thought leader in JTBD, he covers a range of topics. Overall, it’s a
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about assessing how much better or worse a product is at helping the customer get a job done. For instance, in his famous milkshake story, Clayton Christensen discusses different forms of breakfast that people might get while commuting to work. He shows that milkshakes perform better where others fail, such as a
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, from understanding your market to creating solutions that fit. Their approach is skewed toward solution space JTBD, or why people “hire” a solution (a la Clayton Christensen). They provide a rich, complete framework for testing assumptions via hypotheses. JTBD is an element that carries throughout their stages of development. Ash Maurya, Running
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architecture, and capabilities, such as a rise in video calls. Skype’s rise is an example of what’s called “disruption,” a concept formalized by Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Figure 7.1 shows the dynamics of basic disruption. The horizontal axis shows the development of a
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evolving. A return to jobs thinking, according to Christensen, is the general antidote to disruption. FIGURE 7.1 The dynamics of disruption were outlined by Clayton Christensen: newcomers upend incumbents with cheaper, lower performing offerings. Disruption is a cautionary tale of how good management—maximizing short-term profits at the expense of
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at ways that organizations can continue to create value through the JTBD lens. PLAY Survive Disruption with JTBD To guard against disruption, Maxwell Wessel and Clayton Christensen propose a simple, straightforward way to look at disruptive threats. In their article “Surviving Disruption” they write:1 Identifying what jobs people need done and
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a new team focused on the growth opportunities that arise from the disruption. LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PLAY: SURVIVE DISRUPTION WITH JTBD Maxwell Wessel and Clayton Christensen, “Surviving Disruption,” Harvard Business Review (December 2012). This article details the authors’ technique for identifying potential disruption. They directly connect JTBD thinking with disruption in
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of your organizing dimensions. This puts a focus directly on customer-centered thinking in a way that is inherent to the company structure. Consider how Clayton Christensen and his coauthors put it in their book Competing Against Luck:6 Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is
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customer outperform competitors. JTBD provides a much-needed view from the outside-in to effect organizational change. LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PLAY: ORGANIZE AROUND JOBS Clayton Christensen et al., “Integrating Around a Job,” Chap. 7 in Competing Against Luck (New York: HarperBusiness, 2016). Christensen highlights the importance of organizing processes and functions
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an organization’s most valuable asset. The problem is that traditional segmentation and the general view of customers is based on demographic attributes. Consider what Clayton Christensen and coauthors Scott Cook and Taddy Hall had to say in their article “Marketing Malpractice:”9 The prevailing methods of segmentation that budding managers learn
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the steps outlined previously. Using JTBD, you can look at your company in a whole new light. LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PLAY: EXPAND MARKET OPPORTUNITIES Clayton Christensen et al., “Marketing Malpractice,” Harvard Business Review (December 2005). This landmark article by several prominent business thought leaders questions traditional ways of market segmentation. The
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a strategy to creating a future vision of customer value. More specifically, jobs to be done are a key antidote for disruption. Maxwell Wessel and Clayton Christensen showed how jobs thinking can be used as the basis for a simple analysis of market threats. Comparing an incumbent’s offering to competing solutions
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of how customers will respond to that initial question. SEE: • Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta. Jobs-to-Be-Done: The Handbook (Re-Wired Group, 2014). • Clayton Christensen et al. “How to Hear What Your Customers Don’t Say,” Chapter 5 in Competing Against Luck (HarperBusiness, 2016) • Alan Klement. When Coffee and Kale
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. Formulate your job statements using the rules of JTBD outlined in Chapter 2, “Core Concepts of JTBD.” (Re)developing Value 1. Survive disruption According to Clayton Christensen, the father of JTBD theory, identifying the jobs that people are trying to get done stands at the core of understanding market disruption. People will
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for agreement. It doesn’t seek to be exhaustive, so there is inherent prioritization based on strategic imperatives and company vision. SEE: • Maxwell Wessel and Clayton Christensen. “Surviving Disruption” (Harvard Business Review, 2012) 2. Create a jobs-based strategy The JTBD perspective offers a new way of looking at strategy from the
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communication be different for the teams involved? See if there is a logical matrix-like structure to introduce jobs thinking into the org chart. SEE: • Clayton Christensen et al. “Integrating Around a Job,” Ch 7 in Competing Against Luck (HarperBusiness 2016) 4. Consider ways to expand market opportunities A jobs-based approach
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be multiple, viable answers. In the end, it’s the discussion that’s important and getting others to open their minds to new possibilities. SEE: • Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall. “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” Harvard Business Review (Dec 2005) Resources on JTBD Adams, Paul. “The Dribbblisation of
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Bettencourt. “Giving Customers a Fair Hearing,” MIT Sloan Management Review (Apr 2008) https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/giving-customers-a-fair-hearing/ Wessel, Maxwell and Clayton Christensen. “Surviving Disruption,” Harvard Business Review (Dec 2012) Wilson, Mark. “Trulia Is Building the Netflix for Neighborhoods,” Fast Company (Aug 2018) Wunker, Stephen, Jessica Wattman, and
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to use the GoToWebinar case story. Finally, this book is a tribute to the pioneers and thought leaders in the field of JTBD, starting with Clayton Christensen, Bob Moesta, and everyone at the Re-Wired group who have led the way with their groundbreaking work. Tony Ulwick, Mike Boysen, and others at
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-done-cancel-interviews/ 8. Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). Chapter 7: (Re)Developing Value 1. Maxwell Wessel and Clayton Christensen, “Surviving Disruption,” Harvard Business Review (December 2012). 2. Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes, and Janmejaya Sinha, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press
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Ivarsson, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds” (white paper, October 2012), https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf 6. Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck (New York: HarperBusiness, 2016). 7. See William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review
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(September 2014). 8. See Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, “Creating Shared Value,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 2011). 9. Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall, “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” Harvard Business Review (December 2005). 10. Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald · 24 Apr 2017 · 827pp · 239,762 words
the only ones who can really untangle these knots are the ones in power.” He then proposes another way to look at it: “HBS professor Clayton Christensen talks about resources, priorities, and processes. The resources are there. But what about the processes people go through from day one at HBS until they
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magazine increased its frequency to ten times a year, cast a wider net for stories, and made some great hires. One notable piece: In 2000, Clayton Christensen and Michael Overdorf’s article, “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change,” thrust Christensen’s theory of disruption into the national conversation. But Wetlaufer’s personal
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education. And he does think that there are some very smart people there doing very interesting things. “There will always be somebody at HBS—a Clayton Christensen, a Michael Porter, or a Josh Lerner—who is doing their part at helping us understand the really big picture,” he says. “But I have
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of Leadership at HBS, he wrote a book, Matsushita Leadership, in praise of the company’s founder.) There is Dr. Harry Levinson’s Levinson Institute. Clayton Christensen’s nonprofit Christensen Institute applies his theories about disruption to health care and education, while the for-profit Innosight does the same thing for business
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professional speaking circuit. In 2014, the website Poets & Quants noted that the three highest-paid speakers in all of academia were at HBS: Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, and John Kotter. Porter was the top biller, at $150,000 a speech, followed by Christensen ($100,000) and Kotter ($85,000). Remarkably, those numbers
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worst of HBS all at once. First and foremost, he broke new ground in the field of strategy. With the possible exception of his colleague Clayton Christensen, who can be credited with popularizing the concept of “disruptive innovation,” Porter’s work represents the high-water mark of intellectual influence at HBS, at
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conglomerate around whom a consulting business, speaking engagements, and bestselling books revolve. The man who has come closest to replicating the Porter business model is Clayton Christensen, with his theory of disruptive innovation. He’s Porter’s Mini-Me. (To dedicate a chapter to Christensen would be duplicative. It’s the same
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from Moses.”4 Clark is by no means the best-known Mormon to have HBS on his resume. That honor belongs to Mitt Romney or Clayton Christensen. “Mormons are such a force at Harvard Business School that people joke about being dominated by the three ‘Ms’ (the other two are McKinsey and
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hearts, everyone involved with HBS believes that MBAs shouldn’t just be running businesses, they should be running everything else as well. Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, the School’s most famous professors, think they know how to save both the American health care and education systems. While George W. Bush did
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to the level of bona fide celebrity. Michael Porter comes close, but the man’s Q-score has still got to be close to zero. Clayton Christensen might have sold more books than any of his contemporaries, but the man on the street isn’t likely to know his name, either. That
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,” that question resulted in HBS facing what was, in effect, a choice between the ideas of its two most prominent faculty members—Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. While a number of its closest competitors, including Wharton and Stanford, had begun offering free so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, with the
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his work would argue not just for a fee, but a substantial one. On the other hand, were it to hew to the ideas of Clayton Christensen, the mandates of disruption that underlie much of his work would argue for making it cheap and for responding quickly. The School went with Michael
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that they can? Even when they take that rare step back and talk about more important things, it leads them to miss the point—see Clayton Christensen’s 2010 HBR piece, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” But life is not a case study. A better question would be How Will You
Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson · 27 Mar 2017 · 293pp · 78,439 words
competitors. Xerox: The Capabilities Link Now for the C part of the equation, the capabilities link. In 1997, Innosight cofounder and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen released The Innovator’s Dilemma, describing how well-run incumbents fail in the face of disruptive change. The capabilities link flips the dilemma. It allows
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have to discover or demonstrate that you’re targeting a real market need. However, companies often find it painfully difficult to change how they operate. Clayton Christensen’s famous book The Innovator’s Dilemma contains numerous case examples of market leaders in industries, ranging from steel to accounting software, that struggled to
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need to do one of two things. Either conduct detailed research (if you do, we highly recommend reading Competing Against Luck, a 2016 book by Clayton Christensen, our colleague David Duncan, Taddy Hall, and Karen Dillon) or rely on the accumulated experience of your team to provide detailed answers to these five
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$1 trillion. Student outcomes have not matched cost increases, and this means that the return on investment in education is decreasing. In 2013, disruption guru Clayton Christensen predicted that 50 percent of universities could fail over the next fifteen years. In parallel, the rise of high-speed networks, the improvement of video
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Advantage. A cover note promises that the book will describe “why leading companies abruptly lose their markets to new competitors.” In the 1990s, Innosight cofounder Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma, whose cover proclaims that the book will show readers how “new technologies cause great companies to fail.” The titles grow
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, which can be grouped into three stages. Next, we describe these warning signs in depth, explain how to identify them, and explore why they suggest Clayton Christensen’s fears about the future of the Harvard Business School’s flagship two-year MBA program have merit. Stage 1: Circumstances Forest fires are more
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few years into the future. When you recognize the cost of inaction, it raises the imperative of response. Is Christensen’s Fear Justified? In 2014, Clayton Christensen gave the annual management lecture for the Singapore Institute of Management to a thousand-person audience. He described the disruptions taking place in education, saying
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to sell a particular product or service, much less to serve any customers. No, it is to maximize shareholder value. As Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen likes to note, the primary job of many managers is to “source, assemble, and ship numbers.” And short-term numbers at that. Worshipping at what
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of industries. We coupled those findings with a survey of members of our community and Harvard Business School graduates who took a course created by Clayton Christensen that features the disruptive model at its core. Informed by that work, the text that follows details five industries where we see the potential for
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during their time at Innosight. We are equally grateful for the support, friendship, and spirit of partnership from Innosight cofounder and Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. His seminal work on disruptive innovation continues to have an outsized influence on our own thinking, as does the thought leadership of our friends Vijay
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work includes The First Mile (2014), The Little Black Book of Innovation (2011), and Seeing What’s Next (2004, with Harvard professor and Innosight cofounder Clayton Christensen). Scott is on the board of directors of MediaCorp, a diversified media company based in Singapore, and he chairs the investment committee for IDEAS Ventures
A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger · 4 Mar 2014 · 374pp · 89,725 words
interviewed confirmed a dearth of student questions, even among bright Ivy Leaguers. “For twenty years I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Business School,” professor Clayton Christensen told me. “And I love this place, but the intuition to ask questions, the curiosity, is much less than twenty years ago.” As to the
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from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘Did you learn anything today?’ [my mother ] would say, ‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’” Clayton Christensen thinks parents can help their kids be more inquisitive by posing what if questions “that invite children to think deeply about the world around them
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a leader who embraces uncertainty? Should mission statements be mission questions? How might we create a culture of inquiry? Why do smart businesspeople screw up? Clayton Christensen is today considered one of the foremost experts on business innovation. A veteran professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen introduced the term disruptive innovation1
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Joichi Ito, as well as to the former director Frank Moss. From Harvard University, my thanks go to Tony Wagner, Paul Harris, Paul Bottino, and Clayton Christensen. Representing Yale, the brilliant writer William Deresiewicz was an immense help. Stanford University’s Bob Sutton provided inspiration with his ideas about vuja de. There
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300 questions,” when the study focused on four-year-old girls, the number of questions rose to 390 per day.) 6 The business-innovation guru Clayton Christensen . . . From my interview with Christensen, January 8, 2013. 7 rather, it has “turbocharged” it . . . From my interviews with Gregersen, January and April of 2013. The
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appearing on Signals vs. Noise, an online publication of 37signals.com http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3424-my-mother-made-me-a-scientist-without-ever; Clayton Christensen’s quote is from my interview with him; David Kelley’s quote from his interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, airdate January 6, 2012
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Glimmer. 4 “Why does it pay to swim with dolphins?” . . . The story about Marc Benioff’s question was told in Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). The quote about “turning the software industry
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’s book Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Chapter 4: Questioning in Business 1 Christensen introduced the term disruptive innovation . . . The section on Clayton Christensen is from my interview with Christensen, plus the following sources: Christensen’s online interview on the HBR Channel’s The Idea, posted on www.claytonchristensen
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control the laser? What if it could be done by thinking, not blinking? Why are the smartest business people in the world having this problem?, (Clayton Christensen’s question) Why were only the newcomers seizing this opportunity? Why weren’t the established leaders, with all their know-how and resources, able to
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words
them. These essays draw from the work of many fabulous scientists, too many to list individually. But a handful of thinkers deserve special mention, including Clayton Christensen, Paul DePodesta, Norman Johnson, Scott Page, Jim Surowiecki, and Duncan Watts. Thanks to each of you for sharing your ideas with me so generously. Steve
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of great help to investors and managers. Take a lesson from the slime mold. The Three Steps of Theory Building In a thought-provoking paper, Clayton Christensen, Paul Carlile, and David Sundahl break the process of theory building into three stages (see exhibit 4.1). I discuss each of these stages and
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true that large companies have a difficult time innovating as successfully as smaller companies for a host of reasons. I enthusiastically recommend a book by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution, which provides managers with a useful innovation framework. But the truth is that not all companies can grow
The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind · 24 Aug 2015 · 742pp · 137,937 words
, and automatically to compose articles if an event takes place.220 Users can struggle to tell the difference.221 2.6. Management consulting In 2013 Clayton Christensen claimed, in a Harvard Business Review article, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, that change was ‘inevitable’ in consulting, and that those who had traditionally
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‘a primer on the fundamentals of business’), and a range of specialized individual business courses. Building this platform was not without controversy—Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen, two of Harvard Business School’s best-known professors, disagreed publicly about whether it was the right approach to take.245 For entrepreneurs and small
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, 15 Dec. 2014 <http://www.wsj.com> (accessed 8 March). 221 Christer Clerwall, ‘Enter the Robot Journalist’, Journalism Practice, 8: 5 (2014), 519–31. 222 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 223
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2015); Mini Joseph Tejaswi, ‘Accenture to hire aggressively in India’, Times of India, 18 July 2012 <www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 229 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 230
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<http://www.deloittemanagedanalytics.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 231 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 232
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Massoudi, ‘Goldman Sachs leads $15m financing of data service for investors’, Financial Times, 23 Nov. 2014 <http://www.ft.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 244 Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang, and Derek van Bever, ‘Consulting on the Cusp of Disruption’, Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013 <https://hbr.org> (accessed 8 March 2015). 245
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professions can be categorized under two broad headings—automation and innovation.8 This marks a break from our recent writing,9 where we relied on Clayton Christensen’s deservedly influential distinction between ‘sustaining’ and ‘disruptive’ technologies.10 Broadly speaking, according to Christensen, sustaining technologies are those that support and enhance traditional ways
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Illich, ‘Disabling Professions’ in Disabling Professions, ed. Irving K. Zola et al. (2000). 3 W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy (2005). 4 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). 5 Paul Geroski and Constantinos Markides, Fast Second (2005). 6 Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism: The Rise and
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, The Future of Law (1996), 49–50. 9 Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, The End of Lawyers? (2010), and The Future of Law. 10 See Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), and Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine’, New Yorker, 23 June 2014. 11 See e.g
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. Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, The Innovative University (2011). 12 Joseph Schumpeter describes the process of ‘creative destruction’ in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1994), foreshadowing this contemporary
How Will You Measure Your Life?
by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen and Allworth, James · 15 May 2012
us such happiness. I dedicate this book to them—and hope that the thoughts in this book will help you, as they have helped us. —Clayton Christensen I MUST CONFESS: if you’d told me three years ago, just before I was to embark on an adventure to business school in a
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, truly hope that you’re able to get as much out of these pages as I did in helping to craft them. —James Allworth MEETING CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN changed my life. In the spring of 2010, as the editor of Harvard Business Review magazine, I had been casting around for an article that
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and debate among the three of us. I consider myself lucky to have had the invaluable benefit of a private tutorial in the theories of Clayton Christensen. But more important, I consider myself privileged to have had the chance to collaborate with a man who is brilliant, kind, and generous not some
Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge · 29 Nov 2011 · 460pp · 131,579 words
the former colonial powers. Moreover, these emerging markets are likely to shake things up not only in their own backyards but in rich countries, too. Clayton Christensen has coined the term “disruptive innovation” for new products that slash prices and new processes that radically change the way they are made and delivered
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these facts will put constant pressure on public services to explain and improve. The second idea goes under the very ungentlemanly name of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen made his reputation looking at the way disruptive innovators have reconfigured markets and boosted productivity in the private sector. More recently, he has devoted a
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-up member of the management theory club, with an MBA from Harvard Business School and glowing endorsements from serious thinkers such as Warren Bennis and Clayton Christensen. He claims that one of his biggest inspirations was Peter Drucker, who insisted that “effectiveness is a habit” and provided him one of his seven
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under way: Gates is devoting a growing amount of his time to thinking about energy and handing over his work on healthcare to other people. Clayton Christensen has also written sensitively on the subject of “managing oneself.”7 Like Covey, Christensen is a devout Mormon (which helps to explain his willingness to
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. Marr and Creelman, More with Less, p. 18. 5. McKinsey & Company, “The economic impact of the achievement gap in America’s schools.” April 2009. 6. Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and Michael Horn, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008). CHAPTER 14: THE
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, Management: Revised Edition (New York: HarperBusiness, 2008), pp. 481–97. 5. Rosenstein, Living in More Than One World, p. 21. 6. Ibid., p. 69. 7. Clayton Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. 8. Quoted in Tim Hindle, Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus (London: Profile
The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand · 17 Oct 2016 · 554pp · 149,489 words
was hardly a bold move. Nor was the separation of new and old businesses particularly novel. Just a few years earlier Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen had advocated that approach to innovation in his bestselling book, The Innovator’s Dilemma . What was novel was what transpired next at VG —a result
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 14 Jul 2012 · 299pp · 92,782 words
diluted the advantage of the stronger teams.7 Colonel Blotto also has parallels to business. One illustration is the theory of disruptive innovation developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. Christensen studies why great companies with smart managements and substantial resources consistently lose to companies with simpler, cheaper, and inferior products
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they learned not to go toe-to-toe with their stronger foe. Instead, they pursued alternative strategies and tactics, including those of guerrilla warfare. Professor Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation shows how companies that are initially weaker overcome their more formidable competitors. One of his insights is that the stronger
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