Excerpt from the book Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen
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Couldn't agree more! Indeed a great question to ask!
As W. Edwards Deiming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: "If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?
For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.
Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little, some are big. Some surface unpredictably, some regularly. Other times we know they're coming. When we realise we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done.
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Srik
