Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

As W. Edwards Deming is also credited with observing, every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. If we believe that innovation is messy and imperfect and unknowable, we build processes that operationalize those beliefs. And that’s what many companies have done: unwittingly designed innovation processes that perfectly churn

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the s

competitive advantage is built not just by understanding customers’ jobs, but by creating the experiences that customers seek both in purchasing and using the product or service—and then, crucially, building internal processes to ensure that those experiences are reliably delivered to the customer every time. That is what’s hard for competitors to

Having a jobs-focused organization, the CEOs we interviewed for this book tell us, leads to four categories of clear benefit: Enable distributed decision making with clarity of purpose—employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good jobs-focused decisions and to be autonomous and innovative. Align resources against what matters mos

Historically, FranklinCovey operated like a typical training company. It created content that potential customers, such as sales people, would find useful and designed courses that enabled client training managers to perform their job of offering sales training to their employees. But it discovered that training budgets are highly vulnerable in tou

FranklinCovey created an offering that not only included training, but also included stationing a full-time coach at the client’s headquarters to ensure that the process improvements were adhered to for all sales prospects above $500 million. “A company doesn’t get a lot of ‘at bats’ with contracts of that size,” Whitman says. “So we own the outcom

“We try to position ourselves around jobs that don’t have competitors,” Whitman says. If a company is looking to change its strategy, that work usually goes to a conventional consulting firm. But if they want help in implanting that strategy, getting large numbers of people to do something better or more consistently in order to invariably execute

the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic.

innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth.