Book SummaryCompeting Against Luck, by Clayton Christensen

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Competing Against Luck

Is it possible to know for a fact how successful a new product will be before you take it to market? Is it possible to predict exactly what your customers want to buy, instead of guessing and hoping you’ll get lucky? According to business consultant and best-selling author Clayton Christensen, the answer to these two questions is yes.

In Competing Against Luck, published in 2016, Christensen offers a conceptual framework for analyzing consumer demand and guiding product innovation. His main idea is that people buy products to accomplish specific tasks—for instance, if you want to have fun on a beach vacation, you might buy a surfboard or a fantasy novel to do the task for you. He developed this framework (that he calls “jobs theory”) over years of research and teaching, finally compiling his insights in Competing Against Luck.

Christensen argues that this theoretical framework is the best way to represent the...

Competing Against Luck Summary The Problem: Typical Innovation Strategies Don’t Work

Christensen argues that the way most companies think about business innovation is misguided. Many business leaders assume that tracking the right metrics and gathering enough hard data will reveal what profitable products to design or how to make their products better. For instance, a clothing company may track what smartphone apps their customers use to try and learn what their target demographic wants. If the company sees that their customers spend 75% of their time on social media apps, they could interpret this as demand for social engagement and they might respond by adding chatrooms to their shopping app.

These companies spend an exorbitant amount of money on comprehensive data analytics to aid research and development, but often, their innovations fail to make their products much better for the consumer. Their investment is wasted, and any successful innovations they do produce are due to lucky guesses.

(Shortform note: Contrary to Christensen’s claim, some surveys reveal that data analytics may be key to effective product innovation. One survey of 1,500 companies found that [90% of the companies showing improved customer results were rated either “good” or...

Competing Against Luck Summary The Solution: How Consumer Tasks Guide Innovation

Christensen asserts that successful leaders don’t use data to inspire innovative business decisions; instead, they use their subjective understanding of consumer tasks. Let’s take a closer look at Christensen’s idea of consumer tasks—the concept at the core of his framework for innovation.

What Are Tasks?

As mentioned earlier, Christensen defines a task as a specific purpose that customers accomplish by buying a product, such as “entertain me and help me forget about work during my vacation.” He explains that tasks are useful sources of insight about customers because they identify the root motivation behind a customer’s purchase, something that impersonal, often superficial data are ill-suited to accomplish.

Identifying consumer tasks comes with many benefits, notes Christensen. Once you’ve defined a task in detail, it’s much easier to come up with innovative ideas on how to better accomplish it. Additionally, you can predict whether an innovative product will succeed in the marketplace by judging how well it accomplishes that task.

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Competing Against Luck Summary How to Center an Organization Around Consumer Tasks

Now that we’ve covered how to identify a task and design a product that solves one, we’ll explain how to build an effective organization by centering all its operations around the idea of the consumer task. Here are three task-oriented strategies organizations can use to thrive.

Strategy #1: Establish Repeatable Procedures to Accomplish a Consumer Task

Christensen argues that the end goal of all organizations should be to accomplish a specific customer task as well as possible. This includes designing an effective product and doing everything necessary to ensure that it satisfies the customers who buy it.

To that end, Christensen recommends identifying a series of procedures that, when completed, always result in a product that gets the customer’s task done satisfactorily. Then, repeat these procedures. Consistent procedures mean that even if individual members of your organization come and go, the result stays the same, guaranteeing customer satisfaction.

For example, if you’re selling a video game that solves the task “give me a thrilling, immersive second life I can escape to,” you must establish a procedure for how you’ll resolve bugs that could ruin the...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Innovating With Consumer Tasks

Competing Against Luck offers a conceptual framework that explores what makes a product successful. Practice thinking in these terms by analyzing purchases you’ve made in the past, to help you identify innovative ways to solve similar tasks.

Think of one or two products or services you’ve purchased and brainstorm what consumer tasks they’re trying to solve. Remember that the tasks should be specific enough to inspire solutions, but vague enough to accommodate a wide range of solutions. (For example, perhaps you recently took a flight for a family vacation in another country. In this case, the task the airline solved for you may have been “get me to my destination with everything I need to enjoy time with my family.”)