[Clayton Christensen, speaker, stands in front of a class or lecture room with a projection screen behind him.]

Clayton Christensen: Hi, my name's Clay Christensen. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School. I brought with me a set of puzzles all related to innovation.

We decided that the way we teach marketing is at the core of what makes motivation difficult to achieve. 

The most helpful way we've thought of it so far is that we actually hire products to do things for us and understanding what job we have to do in our lives for which we would hire a product is really the key to cracking this problem of motivating customers to buy what we're offering. 

[The text “Market Understanding That Mirrors How Customers Experience Life” appears on the screen behind speaker with a picture of a milkshake cup.]

So I wanted just to tell you a story about a project we did for one of the big fast food restaurants. They were trying to goose up the sales of their milkshakes. They had just studied this problem up the gazoo. They brought in customers who fit the profile of the quintessential milkshake consumer and they gave them samples and asked, "Could you tell us how we can improve our milkshake so you'd buy more of them? Do you want it chocolatier, cheaper, chunkier, or chewier?" They get very clear feedback. They would then improve the milkshake on those dimensions, and it had no impact on sales or profits whatsoever. 

So one of our colleagues went in with a different question on his mind, and that was, "I wonder what job arises in people's lives that caused them to come to this restaurant to hire a milkshake?" 

[The text “What Job Causes You to Hire a Milkshake?” appears on the screen behind speaker.] 

So we stood in a restaurant for 18 hours one day and just took very careful data: what time did they buy these milkshakes, what were they wearing, were they alone, did they buy other food with it, did they eat it in the restaurant or drive off with it? It turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 o'clock in the morning. 

[The text “Half of the Milkshakes Were Sold Before 8 AM” appears on the screen behind speaker with an image of a clock.]

The people who bought them were always alone. It was the only thing they bought, and they all got in the car and drove off with it. 

So to figure out what job they were trying to hire it to do, we came back the next day and stood outside the restaurant so we could confront these folks as they left the milkshake in hand. And in language that they could understand, we essentially asked, "Excuse me, please, but I got to sort this puzzle out. What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?" And they'd struggle to answer, so we didn't help them, asking other questions like, "Well, think about the last time you were in the same situation needing to get the same job done, but you didn't come here to hire a milkshake. What did you hire?" 

And then as we put all of their answers together, it became clear that they all had the same job to do in the morning, and that is they had a long and boring drive to work, and they just needed something to do how they drove to keep the commute interesting. 

[Graphic image of many cars commuting appears on the screen behind speaker.] 

One hand had to be on the wheel, but somebody given him another hand and there wasn't anything in it, and they just needed something to do while they drove. They weren't hungry yet, but they knew they'd be hungry by 10 o'clock, so they also wanted something that would just pull down there and stay for their morning.

"Good question. What do I hire when I do this job? You know, I've never framed the question that way before, but last Friday I heard a banana to do the job. Take my word for it, never hire bananas. They're gone in three minutes. You're hungry by 7:30. 

If you promise not to tell my wife, I probably hire donuts twice a week, but they don't do it well either. They're gone fast, they crumb all over my clothes, they get my fingers gooey. Sometimes I hire bagels, but as you know, they're so dry and tasteless, then I have to steer the car with my knees while I'm putting jam on them, and then if the phone rings, we got that crisis. I remember I hired a Snickers bar once, but ah, I felt so guilty, I've never hired Snickers again.

[Graphic image of a car and driver with a milkshake appears on the screen behind speaker.] 

Let me tell you, when I come here and hire this milkshake, it is so viscous that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up that thin little straw. Who cares what the ingredients are? I don't. All I know is I'm full all morning and it fits right here in my cup holder." Well, it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors, which in the customers' minds are not Burger King milkshakes, but it's bananas, donuts, bagels, Snickers bars, coffee, and so on. 

[The text “Understanding the Job Makes Improvement Simple” appears on the screen behind speaker.]

But I hope you can see how, if you understand the job, how to improve the product becomes just obvious.

Roger McCarty: In determining what you're gonna work on, on a project, you first have the project description that was given to you by your company sponsor. That project description tells you what it is they want you to do, so they told you what they wanted. What are you waiting for? Just go out and get started. Does that seem like a good idea to you? Well, in my experience, that's a terrible idea.

Now, the reason it's a terrible idea is because in communicating the project deliverables from the company sponsor to you in the fields and the team, there are only two things of which you can be absolutely certain. One, whatever they were thinking about when they wrote the description is not what you're thinking about when you read it. Whatever they asked for is not going to be what they need.

Now, those seem like pretty bold statements. You remember the discussion of the tree in which we learned that even a very simple concept like a tree can be misunderstood because people have different backgrounds, cultures, and understandings. They are going to make different interpretations of a set of words that are written down, so you have to go through a process to restate and make sure that you understand that, just as we talked about in the tree example.

Secondly, let's talk about this issue of what they asked for is not going to be what they need. 

Well, why would that be? Why would they ask you for something they don't need? Well, in many cases, they submitted this project two weeks to ten months ago. Much may have changed during that time, both in the company and in the world, that would make this project not as relevant in the way that they originally presented it. They may have spent 15 minutes to an hour creating the project definition. You're gonna spend as a team 500 to 700 hours working on this project. You will have a much better concept of this over time than they had in the 15 minutes to an hour that they took to just write up the project.

This project may be a very small part of the things that they're doing, and they may have only given a light thought as they moved ahead. They're very busy, they have many things going on. This may not be the number one thing they're working on. As I said, you're gonna spend a lot of hours as a team working on this, and you'll have a chance to think about it. But the real issue is they were probably thinking about tasks, and we're gonna have you add value by thinking about decisions.

Now, let me tell you why I think that this is a big issue. When I worked in my career, at one point I was a director of business research. So when I took this job over, I thought, kind of cool, I like business research, and I'd been in marketing, sales, and supply chain previously, and I thought the business research would be a lot of fun.

But the first thing I learned after I took the job was that they had done a survey of all of the service groups in the company. And of all of the ten service groups in the company, the business research function was dead last, number 10, worst in the company. I thought, oh great, now I'm in charge of the worst function in the company.

So I went off to meet with the business directors to understand why were you unhappy, what was the problem. And I asked them, "Did my teams not do what you asked them to do?" They said, "Oh no, they did what I asked." "Well, did they not do it on time?" "Oh no, they did it on time." "Did they do a poor job of it?" "Oh no, they did a really good job." "Well then, I'm confused. They did what you asked, they did a good job, and they did it on time. Why were you so unhappy with them?" 

They said, "Well, the reality is your stuff just isn't very valuable. When we ask you a question, you give us an answer, and all we have at the end is more questions than we started with. Your projects aren't creating value for us." Well, that took me back, and I went back and we met with the teams and we discussed why is this happening, what can we do to be more valuable, and we realized that the problem was that we were working on tasks, we were looking on getting little bits of information, we were looking on small projects that didn't have any outcome planned, and so it wasn't valuable. It wasn't creating anything, so we said we're not gonna do that anymore. That's waste. It's a waste of our time, it's a waste of the business manager's time. We're not gonna do it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna require them to tell us what decision are you gonna make and what action are you gonna take. And if they can't tell us that and how our project will help them do it, then we're not gonna do the project.

Well, the first time we told a business manager we weren't gonna do their project 'cause they wouldn't tell us that, he said, "Why do I have to tell you what I'm doing? I'm the business manager, you just have to do it." And I said, "No, they brought me in." And I talked to the business manager, I said, "Listen, I'm really tired of you guys making us look bad by asking us to do things that have no value. If you want us to work on something, show us where it has value."

Now, the business managers realized we were right, and so they would tell us what decision they were trying to make. Now, almost always, whatever they asked us to do was not enough to make the decision or take the action. So we would ask them, "Well, what other information would you need to be able to make the decision or take the action?" And so they would give us something else. And then we talked about, "Well, now can you make the decision?" "Well, no, what else do you need?" And we would continue this until we had a list.

They said, "Okay, with all of that, I'd make the decision." Now, almost always, that was more work than we could do, so we'd say, "Okay, let's be realistic here. Do you really need every piece in here, or is some of this, do we already have a pretty good idea what the answer is and that's good enough?" And they would say, "Well yeah, B and D and G here, we kind of know that, maybe you could just check it, just you know, do a little quick check. You don't have to go do basic research on it, but if our idea's kind of close, then that's good enough. And you know, this piece down here, just give us a little bit of stuff on that, and then these four points, those are the big ones, those are the ones we really want you to do the project on."

So now we're off. We're off with a project that has the chance to succeed because we're working on important elements to the business upon which they want to make decisions and they want to take action. Once we implemented this process and created a template that you will be provided in this class, a template that we used that allowed us to discuss the project in such a way that one, we now had the same picture in our mind that they have in their mind, and two, was being driven toward actions to be taken and decisions to be made.

Once we implemented this over the next 12 months, we did projects based on this new approach. At the end of 12 months, they did another survey of the 10 service groups in the company. Business research went from being dead last, number 10, to number 2 in the company. All we really changed was increasing the value of the projects we did to make them more important and create more value. Our employees became more valuable, they had higher reputations, they were more easily promoted because people saw them creating value.

We want you to create value on your projects. Make sure that you follow the steps in the process so that you have the same picture in your mind that they have in theirs, and you are creating value because your projects will lead toward valuable decisions and actions on the part of the company.