Michelle A.'s Key Ideas from The Innovator's Solution
by Clayton Christensen, Michael Raynor

Customers "hire" products to do specific "jobs".

Customers - people and companies - have "jobs" that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can "hire" to get the job done.

Effectively, conveniently, inexpensively as possible.

Marketers put a lot of emphasis on market segments, dicing up the populace and finding the percentage that will need or want the product. But if you get the process wrong, you can end up without any actual customers. 

To accurately segment the market, don’t focus so much on the attributes of people and things. Instead, look at the circumstances people are in when they make a purchase decision. There are many tasks that people do routinely; people are always looking for things that will do those jobs or help them do those jobs. 

Instead of asking what their company does best today, managers should ask, "What do we need to master today, and what will we need to master in the future, in order to excel on the trajectory of improvement that customers will define as important?"

Three classes or sets of factors that define what an organization can and can not accomplish:

• Resources: they include tangible things like people, equipment, and real estate, but things like brands, information, and reputation are also valuable resources.
• Processes: they turn resources into value and include patterns of interaction, coordination, and communication, as well as the way things are developed, manufactured, and marketed.
• Values: employees at all levels, even those at the bottom of the hierarchy, make decisions. Under the framework, values are standards that determine how employees prioritize these decisions.

DELIBEDeliberate RATE planning (traditional / for existing-sustaining):

• make assumptions about the future
• make a strategy based on those assumptions & build financial projections based on that strategy
• make decisions to invest based on those financial projections
• implement the strategy in order to achieve projected financial results

Discovery-Driven Planning: (for disruptions):

• make the targeted financial projections
• what assumptions must prove true in order for these projections to materialize?
• implement a plan to learn - to test whether the critical assumptions are reasonable
• invest to implement the strategy.