The Job to be Done theory

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Horace Dediu write Asymco and is a first rate analyst of the mobile/post-pc industry mainly looking through it from the prism of Apple. He does fantastic research, uses data very well, makes some compelling graphs and is a student and teacher of innovation and disruption. One bonus of following this blog is the comments on the blog and his podcast with Dan Benjamin.

In the latest podcast he talks to Bob Moesta who Horace says is the pioneer of the Job to be Done theory which was introduced to Clay Christensen’s book; The Innovators Solution following his Innovators Dilemma.

Bob and Horace have a great discussion around the idea of how we need to understand customers better and what job they use products for. It is a lot of design thinking. At TACSI we do the same thing with our Radical Redesign process for social issues and coming out with solutions like Family by Family.

The second part of the discussion in the podcast is about where does kind of work fit in an organisation? Sales, marketing, design, engineering? Who does it?

An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

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A great story from Fast Commpany’s Co-Design website on new products, vision, business model and fighting against all kinds of troubles. A typical entrepreneurial story.

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself–for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

More on the company here.

Sanitary napkins manufacturing unit
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Don’t be so f*king strategic

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Sriram Krishnan writes about what he learnt from a VC about not to be too strategic in some scenarios.

This VC threw up a slide at the end of his slide to summarize most of his talk. It had the following sentence in bold which made the room break into applause.

Don’t be so f-king strategic

All large companies (and I do mean all – this is not a post about Microsoft) tend to be in love with finding the right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything. There are reams and reams of text written on what exactly strategy is and how to go about having a good one. Some of them are actually quite good (for example, Porter’s work on the five forces). You could often get rapped on the knuckles (or worse) for being ‘off-strategy’.

Don’t get me wrong. Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point – Apple over the last decade). The last thing you would want is people off doing their own thing and being all ‘off-strategy’ and rebellious.

But here’s the problem.

You’re not Steve Jobs and your organization is not Apple. And your well-thought out strategy is probably terrible.

Read the rest of the article. Very relevant to Entrepreneurs and fast changing organisations in the social sector. Prototyping, experimenting, design thinking…all come to mind.

Behaviour economics and welfare/stimulus payments

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Business week has an interesting story on the role of designing policies based on behavioral economics. In short, behavioral economics suggests that people are not rational and that they will make decisions not entirely based on rational cost benefit analysis. Well, who knew.

The “making work pay” program in the US was designed to give people stimulus money in small additional payments to their salary and in theory they would have spent the money. What actually happened was that people did not see the small additional difference and saved the money. That by itself is not a bad consequence just that it does fit with the Keynesian stimulus economics.

What is interesting here is that in Australia it was the other way round. There is clear agreement here that lumpsum money is spent immediately on big ticket items. For example, Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister decided to give $900 in stimulus for most people and a lot more for families with children. There were stimulus ads everywhere for people to spend that money. And they spent.

Another example is the baby bonus. In Australia when we have a child the government provides $5000 as a baby bonus to families. What was observed that for some families that created a negative situation in how the money was spent. Now, the bonus is paid over 13 weeks and it seems to work better.

What I am not sure is how did the behavioral economists in the US came to the opposite conclusion for the spending of stimulus money?

Making a dent in the universe

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Christen works as the Venture capital go to guy in The Australian Centre for Social Innovation where I work. He alerted me to the latest Forbes issue on social entrepreneurship, impact investing and using “patient capital” as a VC.

From Forbes profile and story on Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of Acumen Fund.

Novogratz plays the role of auditor because, as CEO and founder of the Acumen Fund, helping people starts with financial due diligence. In April Acumen sank $1.9 million into the bank in exchange for an 18% stake, one small investment in a decadelong experiment in charitable giving. Instead of shoveling aid dollars to causes or governments that give away life-­sustaining goods and services, Acumen espouses investing money wisely in small-time entrepreneurs in the developing world who strive to solve problems, from mosquito netting to bottled water to affordable housing. It’s a new twist on the old adage about teaching a man to fish, except that Novogratz wants to build an entire fish market.

Check out the whole story and it’s associated articles. When Steve Jobs talks about making a dent in the universe this is the kind of stuff which resonates with that statement. Writing this on the iPad I consider that stuff great too!

I think there is a serious lack of patient capital playing the social VC (social as not in twitter and facebook but social enterprises) game here in the Oceania region. This is something I will be exploring next year with my colleagues at TACSI.

You’ll be dead soon

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Steve Blank has an nice story on the importance of courage in the startup world. He points to the importance of reflecting on death that Steve Jobs talked about in his Stanford speech.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Steve Jobs

Lessons Learned from Steve Blank:

  • Yes, premature scaling is a cause of startup death
  • Yes, you need to get out of the building and test your hypotheses
  • But, when an opportunity smacks you in the head for gosh sake grab it with both hands and don’t let go
  • If you can’t, get out of the startup game

    • Exploring the role of Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector

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    The troika of books that I am reading now for the startup stuff is Lean Start up by Eric Ries, The 4 steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and Business Model Generation lead by Alex Osterwalder.

    I have started out with the business model innovation stuff and best of all I am using the iPad app to create the business model for Family by Family. Like I said, I am entering the digital era and moving out from pre-digital.

    As I was reading the Lean StartUp, Eric starts with defining entrepreneurship as “The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” This definitely makes sense and does not restrict first to tech only startups but to go beyond start ups. As he explains his work at Intuit, large and mature organisations and the managers who work there are extremely in the same situation as a start up, especially if they have read the Innovators Dilemma.

    Eric clarifies,

    “Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, a nonprofit, or a decidedly for-profit company with financial investors”

    When I write about business in this blog, I always mean entrepreneurship. In the about pages, I talked about business by providing the definition of the entrepreneur that Drucker used. I discuss startups, write about them, read about them, started a couple and failed in them and am totally energized to work in one now. However, what I have done from the almost my early working days is trying to “to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty”.

    My first job was to sell the services of my organisation which was to design webpages on the internet. Year – 1998. Place – Hyderabad, India. This was before Hyderabad was a powerhouse with Google India HQ, the Indian School of Business etc. Ofcourse, this was when internet connections where 56kbps and the go to browser was Netscape. The challenge was so great that we had to actually ship a computer to a customer’s office to show a mock up web page on a 5 1/2 in floppy in monochrome colour. Don’t laugh!

    My next area of work was in financial services and investment banking outsourcing for investment banks like Goldman Sachs in ADP Wilco. The most exciting part for me was when we were setting up a new project. After 4 years, I left to work for Deeshaa. A real social enterprise trying to make a difference in rural India. And it continued into the government here, two failed startups, and now in Families SA and TACSI I have always worked and thrived in areas when I was creating new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

    Reading this I had the epiphany about my entrepreneurship journey as I saw my last 13 years of working life and decided that will be the tag line for this blog, the headline in LinkedIn and clearly what I am doing now and will continue to do for the foreseeable future.

    Pre-Digital

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    Seth as ever has written a quite obvious but interesting observation.(Via Modern Digital Business)

    A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that’s pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.
    [...]
    School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

    Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: “That place is pre-digital.”

    This is so true. I have been trying to digitize my work for such a long time. Mails in one place, documents to access, my online stuff, things that I work at home, articles I find on the bus reading on the iPhone, the various books and the ideas that I want to share. And don’t even get me started on meetings at work.

    The online services for docs (dropbox, sugarsync, icloud), Kindle books and sharing options, Pinboard for bookmarks but more importantly time shifting software for articles link Read It Later and Instapaper are making a great difference to this. All of this still needs to fit into a workflow and we did not figure out the meetings part of it. And the various bits of paper we use everyday.

    Into this world entered the iPad for me. In less than a week it has become my go to computer for most of the things. Always on, 10 hour battery, fast, but connected to everything. Most importantly with software like Note Taker HD (written by Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet software) is just amazing. I do not take any notebooks now. A stylus, iPad and Notetaker HD. With this complete, I actually feel like I have entered the digital world. Lots more to do but I can experience the digital world now.

    More importantly we need to figure out a way for our businesses to go digital. Not just in the use of softwares (like we use Paycycle for Payroll and moving to Xero for Accounting at TACSI) but to be able to build a workflow around it.