How Will You Measure Your Life?

find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

—C. S. Lewis

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way.

Every time they tackle a problem, employees aren’t just solving the problem itself; in solving it, they are learning what matters. In the language of capabilities from the previous chapters, they are creating an understanding of the priorities in the business, and how to execute them—the processes.

It’s natural to want the people you love to be happy. What can often be difficult is understanding what your role is in that. Thinking about your relationships from the perspective of the job to be done is the best way to understand what’s important to the people who mean the most to you. It allows you to develop true empathy. Asking yourself “What job does my spouse most need me to do?” gives you the ability to think about it in the right unit of analysis.

IKEA has taken a totally different approach. Rather than organizing themselves around the characterization of particular customers or products, IKEA is structured around a job that customers periodically need to get done.

A job?

Through my research on innovation for the past two decades, my colleagues and I have developed a theory about this approach to marketing and product development, which we call “the job to be done.” The insight behind this way of thinking is that what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.

What’s more, Risley and Hart’s research suggests that “language dancing” is the key to this cognitive advantage—not income, ethnicity, or parents’ education. “In other words,” summarized Risley and Hart, “some working-poor people talked a lot to their kids and their kids did really well. Some affluent businesspeople talked very little to their kids and their kids did very poorly…. All the variation in outcomes was taken up by the amount of talking, in the family, to the babies before age three.” A child who enters school with a strong vocabulary and strong cognitive abilities is likely to do well in school early on and continues to do well in the longer term.

There’s significant research emerging that demonstrates just how important the earliest months of life are to the development of intellectual capacity. As recounted in our book Disrupting Class, two researchers, Todd Risley and Betty Hart, studied the effects of how parents talk to a child during the first two and a half years of life. After meticulously observing and recording all of the interactions between parent and child, they noticed that on average, parents speak 1,500 words per hour to their infant children. “Talkative” (often college-educated) parents spoke 2,100 words to their child, on average. By contrast, parents from less verbal (and often less-educated) backgrounds spoke only 600 per hour, on average. If you add that up over the first thirty months, the child of “talkative” parents heard an estimated 48 million words spoken, compared to the disadvantaged child, who heard only 13 million. The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life.

Risley and Hart’s research followed the children they studied as they progressed through school. The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older.

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable. In other words, successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong.