Thinking about the professional opportunities in our lives through the lens of Jobs to Be Done—in essence, asking yourself ‘What Job did I hire my job to do?’—should provide you with a completely different set of criteria for making career moves. What will make you happy, in the long run? It’s seldom as simple as the right title and salary – those are just the functional dimensions of the job to be done. But what about the emotional and social ones?
When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.
Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
A strategy--whether in companies or life--is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money. With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented. How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow--the resource allocation process. If it is not supporting the strategy you decided upon, you run the risk of a serious problem. You might think you are a charitable person, but how often do you really give your time or money to a cause or an organization that you care about? If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices you’ve made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top? Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.
When you make a choice to accept a new job, yes, the company is hiring you, but you’re also hiring the company. You’re trying to make progress in your career and in your life. If you want to be sure you’re making a good choice, you better know what job you’re hiring your company to do for you.
A key element of unpredictability is the customer is very unpredictable but the job is very stable over time, and that brings predictability to innovation. If you understand the jobs to be done, you’re actually competing against companies who still believe it’s just a crap shoot.
There are criticisms that are very important. Never does a theory just pop out in complete form. But rather, the first appearance of the theory is half baked. Then it improves when people say, it doesn’t account for this, or this is an anomaly and it doesn’t explain that. It’s very important to have people willing to criticize it for that purpose.
If you organize your company around a job to be done, it’s actually a lot harder for a new entrant to disrupt you, because most disruptive companies just have my product versus your product, and mine’s cheaper than yours. Jobs to be done is actually good protection for companies worried about being disrupted.
We discover jobs to be done, we don’t develop them or consciously iterate toward them.