The One Thing You Must Do to Remain Flexible in Disruptive Times
There’s an internal IBM PowerPoint slide making its way around the internet that declares, “The Digital Disruption Has Already Happened.”
It cites the following evidence:
- World’s largest taxi company owns no taxis (Uber)
- Largest accommodation provider owns no real estate (Airbnb)
- Largest phone companies own no telecommunications infrastructure (Skype, WeChat)
- World’s most valuable retailer has no inventory (Alibaba)
- Most popular media owner creates no content (Facebook)
- Fastest growing banks have no actual money (SocietyOne)
- World’s largest movie house owns no cinema (Netflix)
- Largest software vendors don’t write the apps (Apple & Google)
Not only is this disruption unprecedented, it is accelerating exponentially.
Business leaders often lament the difficulty of navigating such an environment due to “ever-changing customer needs.” But disruption is not disruptive because customer needs are changing; disruption is disruptive because solutions are changing.
Take a look at the list above again. None of the customer needs have changed in any of the examples. Disruption has occurred because these companies have created solutions that are satisfying customer needs better, not because customer needs have changed. For example:
- Uber is helping customers get a ride better
- Airbnb is helping customers find a place in to stay overnight better
- Skype is helping customers talk long-distance better
More than 400 leaders of the Fortune 1000 companies have used the jobs-to-be-done innovation approach to generate billions of dollars. This requires companies to redefine customer needs as the jobs they want to get done (functional, emotional, and social) and the criteria they use to measure success. One of the chief benefits of defining customer needs this way – separate and distinct from product or service solutions – is that customers can tell us what they want if we ask them what they want to accomplish rather than asking them for product or solution specifications. Solutions become obsolete over time, but customer needs – the jobs they want to accomplish – stay remarkably stable.
Given the increasing unpredictability of the marketplace, it is essential that leaders stay flexible and adaptive. The most important thing leaders can do to stay flexible in these tumultuous times is to define their organization according to the jobs and criteria they help customers get done, not the technology, products or services they sell.
Be capturing all your customers’ jobs to be done and criteria for success, and then determining which are important and unsatisfied with statistical validity, companies now have a killer way to determine where to focus and what to do to creating breakthrough innovations in a repeatable manner. This is how leading innovators creating product/market fit again and again.
Knowing what customers are trying to get done and how they measure success will provide you with a “north star” to guide you through the whitewater of ever-changing solutions. It takes a lot of courage to face the hard reality that your business is being disrupted and to effectively respond. But it will be a lot easier if you define your purpose as helping customers to get specific jobs done rather than selling certain solutions. This helps leaders hold their current solutions a little more loosely and respond more quickly to adopt new and improved ways to satisfy customers.
Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt described companies that describe their mission in terms of their products, services and/or technologies as suffering from “marketing myopia.” The jobs-to-be-done innovation approach is the cure. The cure to marketing myopia is to:
- Redefine your business according to the jobs that you help customers get done.
- Uncover the criteria they use to measure success.
- Determine which jobs and criteria are important and unsatisfied; these are opportunities.
- Generate ideas to help customers address the most attractive opportunities, and develop.
- Systematically scout the horizon for new, better ways to help customers get their jobs done.
That’s how to stay relevant and thrive in disruptive times.
(A version of this article first appeared in The Business Journals, May 26, 2016)
