By Rod Collins
One of Peter Drucker’s most popular and enduring business quotes is, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” This advice has never been truer than it is today as the technologies of digital transformation are changing all the rules for how the world works by displacing top-down hierarchies that amplify the “power of one” with more powerful peer-to-peer networks that enable the “power of many.”
Another famous Drucker quote is, “If you don’t understand innovation, you don’t understand business.” That’s because when your job is to create the future—which is the fundamental responsibility of the business leader—you better have a firm grasp of how innovation works.
Understanding The Job To Be Done
Perhaps no one has advanced our knowledge on the workings of innovation more than Clayton Christensen, whose many books on the topic have become essential reading for twenty-first century business leaders. In his most recent book Competing Against Luck, which he co-wrote with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan, Christensen emphasizes that the starting point for innovation is often uncovering what he calls “the job to be done.” Whereas most attempts at business innovation often start with a product idea, Christensen urges business leaders to step back and take the time to uncover what problem customers are “hiring” their product to solve. If they fully understand that problem and use that knowledge to guide what products to make, they will not only delight their customers, but they may very well create something that has never existed before, which is the essential task of innovation.
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About the Author: Rod Collins (@collinsrod) is the Innovation Sherpa at Salt Flats and the author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books).