Tag: jtbd

Unreasonable Hospitality (book review)

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“How to Treat Other Human Beings” could be the subtitle to Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality. I loved this mix of stories, lessons, reflections, and mistakes. It felt honest. It read fast. I had a library copy but this is one of those put this on the shelf to page through later books.

Unreasonable Hospitality is going above and beyond to treat other human beings well. Take care of each other. Get out of your own head. Avoid your ego in favor of service.

It felt great to read, I’m still glowing.

And unreasonable hospitality is easy. It’s just three things.

First, a desire to do it. Your motivations may vary.

Second, a 95/5 mindset. Things cost money. It’s impossible to provide service without charging and even harder to be over-the-top. So the business model matters.

Guidara’s 95/5 approach is to watch ninety-five percent of the expenses like a hawk. At Eleven Madison Park this meant things like dishwasher racks to reduce breakage. While he managed the MoMA cafe it meant no fresh food an hour before closing time to reduce waste.

In his experiences at many restaurants, Guidara learned to manage costs. What could get cut? What couldn’t? What were the easy (and wrong) metrics? I pictured him like a wise carpenter. Rather than head to Lowe’s, he ripped a spare sheet of 3/4” plywood that was in the corner.

Now, what about that other five percent?

Third, the job to be done.

It’s about delight. Sometimes Guidara gave away the Tiffany champagne flutes to a newly engaged couple. Sometimes he fed the parking meters.

Sometimes it was complementary theater, sports, or concert tickets. Sometimes he served a classic New York City hot dog for a guest who hadn’t had one yet.

Sometimes it meant complementary cognac after dessert and with the arrival of the check. Sometimes it meant ten 100 Grand bars when a guest, preying on their hospitable reputation, asked for a million bucks. That guest loved it.

Why is this person here? What do they want? How can I serve them? What delights them?

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Nothing about Unreasonable Hospitality is new.

But none of it is common.

The book is a chance to change that. With Guidara as a guide, anyone can put a little more hospitality into the world.

–

Note: Part of this book’s impact is its identification. We have plenty of posts about words: words mean competition, the new dictionary series, and words hiding value. Words are important because they identify something. They’re landmarks on our map of life.

In 2008, the story goes. A bunch of NBA players returned to their hotel after a night (and morning) of revelry, only to see Kobe going to the gym while they were headed to bed. Those players saw that and took their careers more seriously. Kobe’s actions were a landmark.

Will’s book is a landmark.

Copywriting Lulz

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“So it’s decided,” goes the commercial, “we’ll park even deeper into parking spaces so people think they’re open.” 

“Surprise.” Lolz.

Good copywriting, a subset of jobs theory, speaks in the customer’s language. And this commercial was not written from a rider’s perspective. It’s a driver’s perspective. 

Insurance is an interesting sale because people hesitate to consider premiums, claims, and losses. We’re ambiguity averse and that’s the whole enchilada with insurance. 

It wasn’t until the birth of the AFLAC duck in 1999, that insurance companies found humor as a path to awareness. Okay, customers thought, it’s not that serious, I can make a phone call. 

But it still had to be kinda serious.

During a rebrand, GEICO found customers saved about 23% and it only took about eight minutes on the phone. However, when they tested that messaging, customers thought it was too good to be true. Instead, “fifteen minutes to save fifteen percent” was born. 

Someone must answer the question: Why is this so cheap? That’s the customer language. 

Insurances sales (all sales!) start with a simple unintimidating prompt. It can’t be too juvenile, even the mayhem man wears a suit. Costs (higher or lower) must be part of a story: Bundle with us and we pass the overhead savings on to you. 

Door Knob Job

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We focus on jobs to be done not because it’s the perfect solution but because it’s underrated.

Think like an economist or moneyballer and ask what is underrated?

The underrated tend to be cheaper for the same results or the same cost for more.

This is a local door. The sunshine hits (and heats!) the handle. The solution is to wrap it in a towel.

This is what jobs theory calls “supply side thinking”. Whoever chose that handle thought about cost, aesthetics, or anything besides use.

“Demand side thinking” starts with consumer progress – a simple cell phone. And that starts by opening the door.

Haircut and Shampoo Jobs

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One part of Jobs theory is that the category may not be the competition. In Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen wrote that V8 is in the juice aisle but it competes with the produce section. No one bought V8 instead of apple juice, but they may buy V8 instead of celery sticks.

Another grocery-based job is the Chobani Flip. The accidental yogurt company’s problem was that people saw yogurt as a morning food. Talking to customers, Chobani found that if people could mix in something else it was seen more like a snack. And the Chobani Flip was born.

Like V8, Flip doesn’t compete with other yogurts, it competes with what else parents might buy. Like Pirate Booty.

This is the Jobs insight: think of the job rather than the place or the product. Proximity (aka category!) is not the competition.

Dove shampoo brand gets this.

Framed as “person on the street”, shampoo reps ask women if they need a haircut. Yeah, it’s my split ends, the women say. Well, what if you try our shampoo first?

Naturally, the shampoo works wonders for treating split ends and the women are happy.

Naturally, it’s a great use of Jobs theory. Rather than compete with other shampoos, this company competes with haircuts.

You keep using that word, competition, I don’t think you know what it means.

Competing Against Luck (book review)

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Clayton Christensen developed The Innovator’s Dilemma to help established organizations understand that when they serve their most profitable customers it leaves them susceptible to innovators who enter the low-end of the market but serve the customers better and move up the market to become the newly established organization.

There’s also a solution.

Why were innovators successful?

They’re undercapitalized, under-experienced, and underwhelming relative to the established company.

The answer was Jobs To Be Done, told in Christensen’s et al. book Competing Against Luck.

Jobs is a way to describe the functional, social, and emotional progress a person wants to make in a given context.

Christensen’s work includes the milkshake example, where he and a team found that people bought milkshakes first thing in the morning. They ‘hired’ the shake to entertain them on the commute and provide some calories. They also finished before work so as not to be judged by their colleagues.

Christensen’s experiences included buying his son a milkshake. This is a different set of functional, social, and emotional progress a person wants to make in the context of being a dad in the afternoons.

This contrast is Jobs.

It’s work to find, but worth it. The process of understanding the job, the context, the progress, and all the parts creates a sustainable advantage (aka profits and avoidance of the market mechanism).

Think about Netflix. If a capitalized and connected Hollywood mogul wanted to compete with Netflix, they could buy all the streaming rights but that misses all the work: physical networks, social networks, technology, production, and so on.

Jobs exist for solutions to enduring and persistent problems. Snapchat was preceded by the IM, which was preceded by the extra-long telephone cord which was preceded by passing notes in class.

Kids talking to each other without adults’ oversight is an enduring and persistent problem.

A large example from the book covers the Southern New Hampshire University online program. Once the staff adopted a Jobs perspective they noticed two sets of customers.

The first was conventional high school graduates who wanted a conventional college experience.

The second was adult learners who needed information, training, and accreditation yesterday.

SNHU found the context was a parent alone at the kitchen table at night and looking for immediate information. Their functional progress was training and certification. Their emotional progress was as role models for their kids.

A university seems like a singular thing. But in the context of these two customers, it must act differently.

With hindsight, Jobs stories are obvious – and we’ve shared plenty – but to find them takes clustering data. The interviews are hard, especially relative to the alternative innovations of: cheaper, faster, sooner, shipped, or a different color.

Some clustering insights:

GM’s OnStar division listened to customer calls and found that it was people who were in an unfamiliar place and wanted to feel safe. OnStar wasn’t directions so much as security.

V8’s product manager saw things through the eyes of their customers who wanted to “eat” their fruits and vegetables. V8 is a juice whose competition isn’t in the juice aisle.

Intuit found that customers didn’t want tax optimization so much as tax minimization. Make this painless, fast, and damn sure I don’t get audited we don’t have time for that.

Along with Bob Moesta’s books, Competing Against Luck is the best introduction to Jobs. Though a touch academic, the sections are fast and full of examples and theories.

Bourbon Jobs

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We hire jobs to be done for three reasons: functional, emotional, and social. This is clear at the liquor store.

In college, we bought cheap beer. The function was to get buzzed and the social job was to have fun doing it. We might upgrade to Coors Light or even PBR which our favorite wing place always had on tap. Even the upgrade is social.

Liquors differ. They’re packaged more colorfully. The containers are shaped. Their origins matter. It’s more story. People like us drink things like this.

In his book, Pappyland, Wright Thompson discusses the bourbon’s brand:

“The reason Pappy’s office was built to look like Monticello, with the leafy grounds of the Stitzel-Weller plant made to feel like an oasis from modern life, was because he knew that bourbon drinkers were often motivated by nostalgia—It’s a drink made for contemplating, and what is usually being contemplated is the easy and often false memory of better days.”

If our core emotions fire on danger, food, and sex then bourbon serves anti-danger. Bourbon serves ‘southern comfort’. It feels like the good old days, with dad or grandpa. Bourbon ads are warm. It’s a drink to sip. We never drank bourbon in college.

Vodka sells sex. Rum sells fun. Gin sells sophistication. Tequila sells a little bit of everything.

“A bottle of bourbon,” Thompson writes, “is a coded way for so many unspoken ideas to be transmitted and understood.” Often jobs are coded, sometimes they’re an enigma. Sometimes not.

But to really understand bourbon’s job, we’d have to go deeper. What’s the context? If this were a documentary what would it look like and feel like? Who is there? What are they wearing and where did they come from?

Greeting Card Competition

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In Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christiansen‘s book about jobs to be done, he talks about the three jobs groups: functional, social, and emotional. Each depends on the situation.

Clayton’s classic example is the milkshake. It functions as nutrition and provides emotional entertainment during a commuter’s morning.

In the afternoon that same milkshake provides a functional snack and an emotional connection between parent and child as an after-school treat.

Lovepop co-founder Wombi Rose talked about the depths those jobs have.

“It’s about helping you with your occasions. We want to make sure you can quickly send a thoughtful and creative gift. We’ve found that everyone wants to be more creative and thoughtful but it takes time. We want to help you with those two challenges. We’ll remind you of those occasions and make it super easy to do something that is creative and thoughtful where what you do is based on your relationship.”

Meaningful messages are costly.

In high school, one of my made-up start-ups was a celebration card company that sent out cards on your behalf. Rather than your forgetful self, hire us to send Aunt Jan’s card on time every time. As my friends pointed out, it kinda took the charm out of the whole experience.

Rory Sutherland, the alchemist, points out that digital wedding invitations work – so long as they’re costly. A song works. A poem worlds. Something that demonstrates an investment works.

Lovepop’s attempt is to link people’s lives to the cards they buy. Does your special someone have a certain plant they love, like a Japanese Maple? Do they like a certain animal? There’s a card for that.

Jobs gives language to discuss the depths. It’s like the wavelength spectrum. We can only see so much. That’s our visual language. But our tools give us the ability to understand a whole lot more. Just like jobs.

“Your Product Sucks”

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“Your product sucks,” said Steve Jobs.

It was 2010. Bob Iger and Jobs came together a few years earlier when Disney acquired Pixar. After years of a cantankerous relationship with Iger’s predecessor, the two titanic executives had become good friends.

But that didn’t spare him from Jobs’ biting criticism.

“Steve, you’re wrong,” replied Iger.

It wasn’t often that Steve Jobs was wrong about the consumer’s taste. But Iger had the research, experience, and authority to disagree.

With a budget of two-hundred million dollars, Iron Man 2 earned over six hundred million at the box office. Steve Jobs was definitely wrong.

These are huge numbers, from huge companies, but the lesson applies to entrepreneurs.

Your product is not for everyone. Steve Jobs was not the customer for Iron Man 2. When you listen to your customer make sure they are your customer.

This is a cross-post from the Daily Entrepreneur newsletter.

Selfie with Chewie

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“May 28th we get Boba Fett and Fennec Shand at the Disneyland version of Galaxy’s Edge,” recalled Disney expert Jim Hill, “This is not in the timeline and we are in a moment, that to accommodate what Star Wars fans say they want to see, Disney theme parks are creating story bubbles.”

The canon, timeline, and story arcs do not matter. The back-to-the-future time travel restrictions are gone.

During a five-day four-night family vacation ya just want to see Chewie.

Me and Chewie, 2017

Similarly, when California Disneyland pitched the flying Spider-Man stunt, Paris Disneyland gave a demurred response.

“There’s research that shows,” Len Testa said, “one of the things people enjoy most about being in the parks is meeting characters.” And that’s what Paris chose, more Marvel meet and greats.

🤳

JTBD supply language is canon and source material. It’s engineering marvels. It’s THE Star Wars or Iron Man or Harry Potter.

JTBD demand language is the fan fiction and vertical video remixes. It’s character selfies. It’s what the people want.

Good products navigate between the absolutism of canon and the requests of the people.

Good products navigate between advanced engineering and more selfie opportunities.