Monthly Archives: December 2011

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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20111201-150520.jpg

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