text:
Excerpt of The Innovator's Solution'
By Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor
Chapter Three: What Products Will Customers Want to
What products should we develop as we execute our disruptive
strategy? Which market segments should we focus upon? How can we know for sure,
in advance, what product features and functions the customers in those segments
will and will not value? How should we communicate the benefits of our products
to our customers, and what brand-building strategy can best create enduring
All companies face the continual challenge of defining
and developing products that customers will scramble to buy. But despite the
best efforts of remarkably talented people, most attempts to create successful
new products fail. Over 60 percent of all new-product development efforts are
scuttled before they ever reach the market. Of the 40 percent that do see the
light of day, 40 percent fail to become profitable and are withdrawn from the
market. By the time you add it all up, three-quarters of the money spent in
product development investments results in products that do not succeed commercially.1
These development efforts are all launched with the expectation of success,
but they seem to flourish or flop in unexpected ways. Once again, we argue that
the failures are really not random at all: They are predictable-and avoidable-if
managers get the categorization stage of theory right. Of the many dimensions
of business building, the challenge of creating products that large numbers
of customers will buy at profitable prices screams out for accurately predictive
The process that marketers call market segmentation is,
in our parlance, the categorization stage of theory building. Only if managers
define market segments that correspond to the circumstances in which customers
find themselves when making purchasing decisions can they accurately theorize
which products will connect with their customers. When managers segment markets
in ways that are misaligned with those circumstances, market segmentation can
actually cause them to fail-essentially because it leads managers to aim their
new products at phantom targets.
We begin this chapter by describing a way to think about
market segmentation that might differ from what you've seen before. We believe
that this approach, based on the notion that customers "hire" products to do
specific "jobs," can help managers segment their markets to mirror the way their
customers experience life. In so doing, this approach can also uncover opportunities
for disruptive innovation.
We will then crawl beneath this concept of segmentation
and explore the forces that cause even the best managers to segment their markets
erroneously. A lot of marketers actually know how to do what we urge in this
chapter. The problem is that predictable forces in operating companies cause
companies to segment markets in counterproductive ways. Finally, we show how
segmenting markets according to the jobs that customers are trying to get done
addresses other important marketing challenges-such as brand management and
product positioning-to help disruptive businesses grow. Taken together, this
set of insights constitutes a theory of how to connect disruptive innovations
with the right customers in order first to create a foothold in a market and
then to grow profitably along the sustaining trajectory into market-dominating
products and services.
Pomp and Circumstances in Segmenting Markets
Much of the art of marketing focuses on segmentation: identifying
groups of customers that are similar enough that the same product or service
will appeal to all of them.2 Marketers often segment markets by product
type, by price point, or by the demographics and psychographics of the individuals
or companies who are their customers. With all the effort expended on segmentation,
why do the innovation strategies based on these categorization or segmentation
schemes fail so frequently? The reason, in our view, is that these delineations
are defined by the attributes of products and customers. As we see over and
over in this book, theories based on attribute-based categorizations can reveal
correlations between attributes and outcomes. But it is only when marketing
theory offers a plausible statement of causality and is built upon circumstance-based
categorization (segmentation) schemes that managers can confidently assert what
features, functions, and positioning will cause customers to buy a product.
Predictable marketing requires an understanding of the
circumstances in which customers buy or use things. Specifically, 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. This is how
customers experience life. Their thought processes originate with an awareness
of needing to get something done, and then they set out to hire something or
someone to do the job as effectively, conveniently, and inexpensively as possible.
The functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the jobs that customers
need to get done constitute the circumstances in which they buy. In other words,
the jobs that customers are trying to get done or the outcomes that they are
trying to achieve constitute a circumstance-based categorization of markets.3
Companies that target their products at the circumstances in which customers
find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that can
launch predictably successful products. Put another way, the critical unit of
analysis is the circumstance and not the customer.
To see why this is so, consider a quick-service restaurant
chain's effort to improve its milkshake sales and profits.4 This
chain's marketers segmented its customers along a variety of psychobehavioral
dimensions in order to define a profile of the customer most likely to buy milkshakes.
In other words, it first structured its market by product-milkshakes-and then
segmented it by the characteristics of existing milkshake customers. These are
both attribute-based categorization schemes. It then assembled panels of people
with these attributes, and explored whether making the shakes thicker, chocolatier,
cheaper, or chunkier would satisfy them better. The chain got clear inputs on
what the customers wanted, but none of the improvements to the product significantly
altered sales or profits.
A new set of researchers then came in to understand what
customers were trying to get done for themselves when they "hired" a milkshake,
and this approach helped the chain's managers see things that traditional market
research had missed. To learn what customers sought when they hired a milkshake,
the researchers spent an eighteen-hour day in a restaurant carefully chronicling
who bought milkshakes. They recorded the time of each milkshake purchase, what
other products the customer purchased, whether the customer was alone or with
a group, whether he or she consumed it on the premises or drove off with it,
and so on. The most surprising insight from this work was that nearly half of
all milkshakes were bought in the early morning. Most often, the milkshake was
the only item these customers purchased, and it was rarely consumed in the restaurant.
The researchers returned to interview customers who purchased
a morning milkshake to understand what they were trying to get done when they
bought it, and they asked what other products they hired instead of a milkshake
on other days when they had to get the same job done. Most of these morning
milkshake customers had hired it to achieve a similar set of outcomes. They
faced a long, boring commute and needed something to make the commute more interesting!
They were "multitasking"-they weren't yet hungry, but knew that if they did
not eat something now, they would be hungry by 10:00. They also faced constraints.
They were in a hurry, were often wearing their work clothes, and at most had
only one free hand.
When these customers looked around for something to hire
to get this job done, sometimes they bought bagels. But bagels got crumbs all
over their clothes and the car. If the bagels were topped with cream cheese
or jam, their fingers and the steering wheel got sticky. Sometimes they hired
a banana to do the job, but it got eaten too fast and did not solve the boring
commute problem. The sorts of sausage, ham, or egg sandwiches that the restaurant
also sold for breakfast made their hands and the steering wheel greasy, and
if customers tried to drag out the time they took to eat the sandwich, it got
cold. Doughnuts didn't last through the 10:00 hunger attack. It turned out that
the milkshake did the job better than almost any available alternative. If managed
competently, it could take as long as twenty minutes to suck the viscous milkshake
through the thin straw, addressing the boring commute problem. It could be eaten
cleanly with one hand with little risk of spillage, and the customers felt less
hungry after consuming the shake than after using most of the alternatives.
Customers were not satisfied that the shake was healthy food, but it didn't
matter because becoming healthy wasn't the job for which they were hiring the
The researchers observed that at other times of the day,
it was often parents who purchased milkshakes, in addition to a complete meal,
for their children. What job were they trying to get done? They were emotionally
exhausted from repeatedly having to say "No" to their kids all day, and they
just needed to feel like they were reasonable parents. They hired milkshakes
as an innocuous way to placate their children and to feel like they were loving
parents. The researchers observed that the milkshakes didn't do this job very
well, though. They saw parents waiting impatiently after they had finished their
own meal while their children struggled to suck the thick milkshake up the thin
straw. Many were discarded half-full when the parents declared that time had
run out.
Segmenting the market along demographic or psychographic
lines indeed provides information on individual customers.6 But the
same busy father who needs a viscous, time-consuming milkshake in the morning
needs something very different later in the day for his child. When researchers
asked customers who have multiple jobs in their lives what attributes of the
milkshake they should improve upon, and when the researchers then averaged each
consumer's response with those of others in the same demographic or psychographic
segment, it led to a one-size-fits-none product that didn't do well any of the
jobs that customers were trying to get done.7
Who is the quick-service chain really competing against
in the morning? Its statistics compare its sales with the milkshake sales of
competing chains. But in the customers' minds, the morning milkshake competes
against boredom, bagels, bananas, doughnuts, instant breakfast drinks, and possibly
coffee. In the evening, milkshakes compete against cookies, ice cream, and promised
purchases in the future that parents hope their children won't remember.
Knowing what job a product gets hired to do (and knowing
what jobs are out there that aren't getting done very well) can give innovators
a much clearer road map for improving their products to beat the true competition
from the customer's perspective-in every dimension of the job. To tackle the
boring commute job, for example, the chain's managers could swirl in tiny chunks
of real fruit. This would nail the boring commute job even better, because the
drivers would at random suck crisp, flavorful chunks into their mouths, adding
a dimension of unpredictability and anticipation to a monotonous morning routine.
(Remember, fruit might make it healthier, but improving health is not the primary
job that the shake gets hired to do.) The chain could make the shake even thicker,
so it would last longer. And they could set up a self-service machine in each
restaurant that customers could operate with a prepaid card, to get in and out
Addressing the evening job-to-be-done would entail a very
different product-one with lower viscosity for quicker consumption, and served
in a small, entertainingly designed container. It would be an inexpensive add-on
to the bundled children's meal, so that when a child begged the parent for it,
the parent could readily say "OK" with little forethought.
If the restaurant chain implemented innovations such as
these that really helped get the jobs done and discarded improvements that were
irrelevant to the jobs that the product is hired to do, it would succeed-but
not by capturing milkshake sales from competing quick-service chains or by cannibalizing
other products on its menu. Rather, the growth would come by taking share from
products in other categories that customers sometimes employed, with limited
satisfaction, to get their particular jobs done. And perhaps more important,
the products would find new growth among "nonconsumers." Competing against nonconsumption
often offers the biggest source of growth in a world of one-size-fits-all products
that do no jobs satisfactorily. We will return to this topic in chapter 4.
Using Circumstance-Based Segmentation to Gain a Disruptive
The first time that builders of a new-growth business need
to assess what the target customers really are trying to get done is when they
are searching for the disruptive foothold-the initial product or service that
is the point of entry for a new-market disruption. When managers position a
disruptive product squarely on a job that has been poorly addressed in the past
that a lot of people are trying to get done, they create a launch pad for subsequent
growth through sustaining innovations that build on the initial platform.8
How can managers identify these foothold opportunities?
It may never be possible to get every dimension of a product introduction in
a new-market disruption right at the outset, which makes it very important to
use the methods of strategy discovery we outline in chapter 8. We believe, however,
that a jobs-to-be-done lens can help innovators come to market with an initial
product that is much closer to what customers ultimately will discover that
they value. The way to get as close as possible to this target is to develop
hypotheses by carefully observing what people seem to be trying to achieve for
themselves, and then to ask them about it.9
Sony's founder, Akio Morita, was a master at watching what
consumers were trying to get done and at marrying those insights with solutions
that helped them do the job better. Between 1950 and 1982, Sony successfully
built twelve different new-market disruptive growth businesses. These included
the original battery-powered pocket transistor radio, launched in 1955, and
the first portable solid-state black-and-white television, in 1959. They also
included videocassette players; portable video recorders; the now-ubiquitous
Walkman, introduced in 1979; and 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, launched in 1981.
How did Sony find these foothold applications that yielded such tremendous up-side
Every new-product launch decision during this era was made
personally by Morita and a trusted group of about five associates. They searched
for disruptive footholds by observing and questioning what people really were
trying to get done. They looked for ways that miniaturized, solid-state electronics
technology might help a larger population of less-skilled and less-affluent
people to accomplish, more conveniently and at less expense, the jobs they were
already trying to get done through awkward, unsatisfactory means. Morita and
his team had an extraordinary track record in finding these footholds for disruption.
Interestingly, 1981 signaled the end of Sony's disruptive
odyssey, and for the next eighteen years the company did not launch a single
new disruptive growth business. The company continued to be innovative, but
its innovations were sustaining in character-they were better products targeted
at existing markets. Sony's PlayStation, for example, is a great product, but
it was a late entrant into a well-established market. Likewise, its Vaio notebook
computers are great products, but they too were late entrants into a well-established
What caused this abrupt shift in Sony's innovation strategy?
In the early 1980s Morita began to withdraw from active management of the company
in order to involve himself in Japanese politics.10 To take his place,
Sony began to employ marketers with MBA's to help identify new-growth opportunities.
The MBA's brought with them sophisticated, quantitative, attribute-based techniques
for segmenting markets and assessing market potential. Although these methods
uncovered some underserved opportunities on trajectories of sustaining improvement
in established markets, they were weak at synthesizing insights from intuitive
observation. In searching for an initial product foothold in new-market disruption,
observation and questioning to determine what customers are trying to do, coupled
with strategies of rapid development and fast feedback, can greatly improve
the probability that a company's products will converge quickly upon a job that
people are trying to get done.
Innovations That Will Sustain the Disruption
Gaining a foothold is just the first battle in the war.
The exciting growth happens when an innovation improves in ways that allow it
to displace incumbent offerings. These are sustaining improvements, relative
to the initial innovation: improvements that stretch to meet the needs of more
and more profitable customers.
With low-end disruptions, it can be easy to determine the
right sequence of product improvements in the up-market march. After the steel
minimills established their foothold in the rebar market, for example, the next
logical step was fairly obvious: Tackle angle iron and thicker bars and rods-the
grades of steel that were just above rebar. For Target Stores, the goal was
to replicate the product line, brands, and ambiance that previously were only
available in expensive, full-service department stores. The low-end disruptor's
marketing task is to extend the lower-cost business model up toward products
that do the jobs that more profitable customers are trying to get done.
With new-market disruptions, in contrast, the challenge
is to invent the upward path, because nobody has been up that trajectory before.
Choosing the right improvements is critical to the disruptive march up-market.
Here again, job-based segmentation logic can help.
Let's examine one of the hottest markets of the last decade-handheld
wireless electronic devices. The BlackBerry, a handheld wireless e-mail device
made by the Canadian company Research in Motion (RIM), is an important competitor
in this field. RIM found the BlackBerry's disruptive foothold at a new spot
on the third axis in the disruption diagram, competing against nonconsumption
by bringing the ability to receive and send e-mail to new contexts such as waiting
lines, public transit, and conference rooms. So what's next? How does RIM sustain
the product improvement and growth trajectory for its BlackBerry? Surely, dozens
of new ideas are pouring into RIM executives' offices every month for improvements
that might be introduced in the next-generation BlackBerry. Which of these ideas
should RIM invest in, and which should it ignore? These are crucial decisions,
with hundreds of millions of dollars in profits at stake in a rapidly growing
RIM's executives could believe that their market is structured
by product categories characterized by some moniker such as "We compete in handheld
wireless devices." If so, they will see the BlackBerry as competing against
products such as the Palm Pilot, Handspring's Treo, Sony's Cli�, mobile telephone
handsets made by Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung, and Microsoft Pocket-PC-based
devices such as Compaq's I-Paq and Hewlett-Packard's Jordana. In order to get
ahead of these competitors, RIM would need to develop better products faster
than the competition. Sony's Cli�, for example, has a digital camera. Nokia's
phones offer not just live conversation and voice messages, but short text messaging
as well. The Palm Pilot's consummately convenient calendaring, rolodexing, and
note-keeping features have almost become industry standards. And does the fact
that Compaq and Hewlett-Packard offer stripped-down versions of Word and Excel
software mean that RIM will be left behind if it does not follow suit?
Defining the market by the characteristics of the product
causes managers to think that in order to beat the competition, RIM would need
to build some number of these features into its next-generation BlackBerry device.
RIM's competitors, of course, would be thinking the same thing-all trying to
cram their competitors' superior features into their products in a race to get
ahead of the pack. As suggested in table 3-1, our worry is that defining market
segments in a product-based way actually causes a headlong, arms race-like rush
toward undifferentiable, one-size-fits-all products that perform poorly any
specific jobs that customers might hire them to do.
Alternatively, RIM's executives might segment their market
in demographic terms-targeting the business traveler, for example-and then add
to the BlackBerry those product improvements that would meet those customers'
needs. This framing would lead RIM to consider a very different set of innovations.
Stripped-down customer relationship management (CRM) software might be considered
essential, because it would allow salespeople to review account histories and
order status quickly before contacting customers. Downloadable electronic books
and magazines would obviate customers' having to carry bulky reading material
in their briefcases. Wireless Internet access, with the attendant capabilities
to alter travel reservations, trade stocks, and find restaurants via global
positioning satellites, could be very appealing. Expense-reporting software
coupled with the ability to transmit reports to headquarters wirelessly might
be a must.
Every executive who has participated in decisions to define
and fund innovation projects will empathize with the tortured difficulty of
answering questions such as these. No wonder that many have come to regard innovation
as a random crap shoot-or worse, a game of Russian roulette.
But what if RIM structured the segments of this market
according to the jobs that people are trying to get done? We've not conducted
serious research on this, but just from watching people who pull out their BlackBerries,
it seems to us that most of them are hiring it to help them be productive in
small snippets of time that otherwise would be wasted. You see BlackBerry owners
reading e-mails while waiting in line at airports. When an executive puts an
always-on BlackBerry on the table in a meeting, what is she trying to do? Just
in case the meeting gets a little slow or boring, she wants to be able to glance
through a few messages unobtrusively, just to be a bit more productive. When
the pace of the meeting picks up, she can slide the BlackBerry aside and pay
attention again.
What is the BlackBerry competing against? What gets hired
when people need to be productive in small snippets of time and they don't pick
up a BlackBerry? They often pick up a wireless phone. Sometimes they pick up
the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes they make notes to themselves. Sometimes
they stare mindlessly at the CNN Airport Network, or sit with glazed eyes in
a boring meeting. From the customer's point of view, these are the BlackBerry's
most direct competitors.
What improvements on the basic BlackBerry wireless e-mail
platform does this framing of the market imply? Word, Excel, and CRM software
are probably out-it's just really hard to boot up, shift mental gears, be productive,
and gear down these activities within a five-minute snippet of time. Snap-on
digital cameras likewise aren't likely to be hired to get this job done.
However, wireless telephony is a no-brainer for RIM, because
leaving and returning voice messages is another way to be productive in small
snippets of time. Financial news headlines and stock quotes would help the BlackBerry
compete more effectively against the Wall Street Journal. And mindless, single-player
games or automatically downloaded Letterman-like lists of ten might help the
BlackBerry gain share against boredom. Viewing the market in terms of the jobs
that its customers are trying to get done would define for RIM an innovation
agenda that is grounded in the way its customers live their lives. The good
news for RIM shareholders is that this appears to be the trajectory the BlackBerry
is on.11
Doing this make-me-productive-in-small-snippets-of-time
job perfectly is not trivial, of course. Adding voice telephony to the BlackBerry
would increase power consumption. This, however, is the type of challenge classically
associated with sustaining innovation. RIM's biggest issue is probably not a
lack of engineering talent; it is deciding which problems it should deploy that
talent against.12
What should Palm do? In the context of the job that the
BlackBerry is hired to do, a camera makes no sense. But might it make sense
on a product like the Palm Pilot that is used to keep track of people? In addition
to just displaying a name card, a camera would enable users to store the person's
image as well-helping Palm Pilot users be better organized by remembering not
just people's names but their faces, too.13
In the Japanese mobile phone market, the strategies of
mobile telephony providers J-Phone and NTT DoCoMo to add a camera and photo
viewer to the mobile phone and to provide the data services required to send
and receive low-quality digital photos met with instant success in the early
2000s. Why? A few years earlier these firms had created a booming new-market
disruption selling wireless Internet access through services like DoCoMo's I-Mode.
Their customers were primarily teenagers, who had hired mobile access to the
Internet in order to have fun with their friends downloading wallpaper and ring
tones. The popularity of limited-functionality cameras and photo viewers on
these teenagers' phones makes sense when viewed through the lens of jobs to
be done: Mobile phones that send and receive photos offer these young people
more and newer kinds of fun.
Should European and North American service and handset
providers attempt to emulate this success by incorporating this functionality
in their phones? At this writing, we expect camera-equipped phones to take off
much more slowly in these markets, because many mobile phone users in these
markets are adults who seem to have hired mobile phones to get work done or
exchange important information in small snippets of time. Cameras and viewers
rarely help get these jobs done better. If these companies were to market phones
and these services to teenagers and children as a new way to have fun by taking
and transmitting images, this product feature could create substantial growth.
But if they follow their demonstrated propensity to deploy the functionality
as a high-priced feature on phones that serious multitasking adults have hired
to get down to business rather than play, our bet is that little growth will
If RIM evolved the BlackBerry to help people be ever more
productive in small snippets of time, if Palm evolved its Pilot to help people
be ever better organized, and if J-Phone's handsets were optimized to help teenagers
have fun, the products would become quite differentiated in consumers' minds-and
each could grow to own a large market share of its respective job. And because
these different jobs arise at different points in time and space in consumers'
lives, we'd bet that for a very long time most consumers would opt to own each
product individually rather than having a single, Swiss army knife-like device-that
is, until a one-size-fits-all device can do all these jobs without compromising
functionality, simplicity, and convenience.
Unfortunately, it appears that many manufacturers in this
space are now on a collision course. Each seems bent on packing every other
competitor's functionality into a single, all-purpose device. Unchecked, this
will lead to commoditized, undifferentiated products that don't do really well
any of the jobs that they once got hired to do. This need not be so. The suicidal
trajectory results from framing the market in terms of the attributes of products
and the attributes of customers, rather than in terms of jobs to be done.
Why Do Executives Segment Markets Counterproductively?
In many ways, what we have said to this point is not news-or
at least it shouldn't be. Good researchers have written persuasively, using
their own vocabulary, that a jobs-to-be-done perspective is the only way to
see accurately what products and services customers will value in the future,
and why.14 Indeed, all executives would say that they dream of dominating
their market with a highly differentiated product. And most marketers will claim
that the very purpose of their work is to understand what customers do with
their products.
In the face of such desires and beliefs, why do so many
managers instead seem to rush headlong in the other direction, basing product
improvement trajectories on attribute-based segmentation schemes that lead to
undifferentiated, one-size-fits-all products? There are at least four reasons
or countervailing forces in established companies that cause managers to target
innovations at attribute-based market segments that are not aligned with the
way that customers live their lives. The first two reasons-the fear of focus
and the demand for crisp quantification-reside in companies' resource allocation
processes. The third reason is that the structure of many retail channels is
attribute focused, and the fourth is that advertising economics influence companies
to target products at customers rather than circumstances.
Fear of Focus
One reason why it is difficult to create packages of products
and services that do particular jobs well is that the more clearly a product
is focused on getting a specific job done perfectly, the less appealing it might
become when hired for other jobs. Clarifying what job a product should be hired
to do, unfortunately, often clarifies what it should not be hired to do. Focus
helps and it hurts-and it is easier to quantify the hurt than the help.
This is an especially vexing issue for companies such as
RIM, Palm, Nokia, and HP as they chart course into a seemingly uncertain future.
Each company is more or less positioned, for now, on a specific job: RIM's BlackBerry
and Nokia in killing time productively, Palm's Pilot in keeping folks organized,
and HP in stripped-down access to computer-based tasks.
If they define their market in terms of the product category,
the most tangible growth opportunities are customers and applications that already
have been captured by the other companies. So RIM looks to organizer software
to help it steal Palm's customers, even as Palm wrestles with ways to make its
Pilot a mobile e-mail device.15 If these companies frame the market
as a product category, then not to pack all these features into the product
indeed seems to sacrifice growth potential.
In contrast, a theory of growth that is grounded on circumstance-based
categories-jobs to be done-would lead RIM not to copy most features in other
handheld devices. This is because the real competition comes from newspapers,
mobile phones, CNN Airport Network, and plain old boredom. There is exciting
growth potential within this job, if RIM can improve its product so that it
does the job better than the real competition. It would grow the size of the
product category by stealing share from competitors that are outside the category.
Furthermore, pursuing this trajectory of improvement would enhance, rather than
destroy, RIM's product differentiation and its consequent ability to sustain
profit margins.
Focus is scary-until you realize that it only means turning
your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers
are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success
in new-product development.
Senior Executives' Demand for Quantification of Opportunities
The job that line executives often hire market research
to do in the resource allocation process is to define the size of the opportunity,
not to understand how customers and markets work.
The information technology (IT) systems in most companies
collect, aggregate, and summarize data in various ways to help managers make
better decisions. The reports are undoubtedly helpful, but they also lead companies
to develop new products and services destined to fail in the marketplace. Almost
all corporate IT reports are structured around one of three constructs: products,
customers, and organizational units. The data show managers how much of each
product is being sold, how profitable each is, which customers are buying which
products, and what costs and revenues are associated with servicing each customer.
IT systems also report revenues and costs by business units, so that managers
can measure the success of the organizations for which they have responsibility.
The odds of developing successful new products begin to
tumble when managers collectively begin to assume that the customer's world
is structured in the same way that the data are aggregated. When managers define
market segments along the lines for which data are available rather than the
jobs that customers need to get done, it becomes impossible to predict whether
a product idea will connect with an important customer job. Using these data
to define market segments causes managers to aim innovation at phantom targets.
When they frame the customer's world in terms of products, innovators start
racing against competitors by proliferating features, functions, and flavors
of products that mean little to customers.16 Framing markets in terms
of customer demographics, they average across several different jobs that arise
in customers' lives and develop one-size-fits-all products that rarely leave
most customers fully satisfied. And framing markets in terms of an organization's
boundaries further restricts innovators' abilities to develop products that
will truly help their customers get the job done perfectly.
Like it or not, although market researchers often develop
a solid understanding of the jobs that customers are trying to do, the primary
language through which the nature of the opportunity must be described in the
resource allocation process is the language of market size. Asking marketers
to understand this concept is not the solution to the problem-because whether
it is called "marketing myopia" or jobs-to-be-done, this concept has been taught
before.17 It is a process problem. Because senior managers typically
hire market research to quantify the size of opportunities rather than to understand
the customer, the resource allocation process systematically and predictably
perverts companies' concept of the structure of their market so that it ultimately
conforms to the lines along which data are available.
As a result, corporate IT systems and the CIOs who administer
them figure among the most important contributors to failure in innovation.
Data purchased from external sources have the same impact, because they are
structured by product attributes, not by job. The readily available data actually
obfuscate the paths to growth.
The solution is not to use data that are collected for
historical performance measurement purposes in the processes of new-product
development. Keep such data quarantined: They are the wrong data for the job.
The size and nature of job-based or circumstance-based market categories actually
can be quantified, but this entails a different research process and statistical
methodology than is typically employed in most market quantification efforts.18
The Structure of Channels
Many retail and distribution channels are organized by
product categories rather than according to the jobs that customers need to
get done.19 This channel structure limits innovators' flexibility
in focusing their products on jobs that need to be done, because products need
to be slotted into the product categories to which shelf space has been allocated.
As an illustration of this challenge, a manufacturer of
power tools observed that when hanging a door, tradesmen used at least seven
different tools, none of which were job specific, and wasted a lot of time picking
up these tools and putting them down. The company developed a new tool concept
positioned on the job that made it much easier to hang doors accurately. However,
it could not be categorized as a plane, a chisel, a screwdriver, a drill, a
level, or a hammer. When the company presented the product to the tool buyer
of a major retail chain, the buyer responded, "Look. I have a job to do. Here's
the plan-o-gram for my shelf space. I buy drills, sanders, and saws. The vendor
that offers the most horsepower at a price point gets the space. Your product
doesn't help me."
This phenomenon leads many new-market disruptors to seek
new channels to the customer-a topic we address in chapter 4. If the product
is disruptive to the established retail or wholesale channels because it doesn't
help those institutions make more money in the way they are structured to make
money, they won't sell it. Consequently, successful disruptive innovators often
find that their product must enable a new class of retailers, distributors,
or value-added resellers to move up-market and disrupt established channels.20
Solving this problem by devising a new channel that is
structured and motivated to sell the disruptive, job-positioned product seems
ludicrous to executives who need innovations to grow very big, very fast. Doesn't
a big established channel promise a much faster ramp to volume? Ironically,
it often does not. Finding or building new channels often means turning your
back on profits that probably would not have materialized in existing channels
Advertising Economics and Brand Strategies
The fourth reason why marketing executives tend to segment
markets by product or customer attributes is to facilitate communication with
customers. It seems easier to devise a communications strategy and to choose
the most cost-effective marketing media buys if consumer markets are sliced
along dimensions such as age, sex, lifestyle, or product category. The same
seems true if marketers slice commercial markets by geography, industry, or
size of business. But when communication strategies drive segmentation schemes,
the attributes of the targeted customers can confuse the product development
process, causing companies to develop products that do several jobs poorly,
and none perfectly.
Think back to our example of the quick-service food restaurant's
milkshakes, and consider a member of a demographic segment-a forty-year-old
married man with two young sweet-toothed children, who also has a long, boring
commute to work and gets hungry at lunchtime. What and how should the chain
communicate to this customer? If it tells him that he can quickly buy a viscous,
interestingly chunky milkshake from a self-serve machine when he needs something
to keep his hands busy during his boring commute, how can the chain also tell
him that he should come back to hire a small liquid shake when he needs to capitulate
to his children? Or drop by to hire a hamburger when feed-me-fast-at-lunchtime
is the job? Sending separate communications about each of these jobs to the
same customer is prohibitively expensive, and yet communicating all of them
to the customer at once would be confusing. So what's the chain to do?
The answer is that just as it needs to develop products
for the circumstance and not the customer, the chain needs to communicate to
the circumstance, and not necessarily to the consumer. It can communicate to
the circumstance with a brand, if it employs the right branding strategy. If
it does this, then when customers find themselves in the circumstance, they
will think instinctively of the brand and know what product to buy in order
to get that job done.
Brands are, at the beginning, hollow words into which marketers
stuff meaning. If a brand's meaning is positioned on a job to be done, then
when the job arises in a customer's life, he or she will remember the brand
and hire the product. Customers pay significant premiums for brands that do
a job well.
Some executives worry that a low-end disruptive product
might harm their established brand. They can escape this problem by appending
a second word to their corporate brand. We call this word a purpose brand because
it communicates to a circumstance-to a job that the disruptive product should
be hired to do. If customers hire a disruptive product to do the wrong job,
it will disappoint and thereby tarnish the corporation's brand.21
If the disruptive product is hired for the job that it was designed to do, it
will delight the customer and thereby strengthen the corporate brand-even though
the disruptive product's functionality may not be as good as that of mainstream
products. This is because customers define quality within the context of the
job to be done.
Let's examine Kodak's experience when it launched single-use
cameras, which were a classic new-market disruption. Because of their inexpensive
plastic lenses, the quality of photographs taken with single-use cameras was
not as good as the photos taken by good 35mm cameras. As a result, the proposition
to launch a single-use camera business encountered vigorous opposition within
Kodak's film division. The corporation finally gave responsibility for the opportunity
to a completely different organizational unit, which launched single-use cameras
with a purpose brand-the Kodak Funsaver. This was a product to be hired when
customers needed to save memories of fun occasions but had forgotten to bring
a camera. The Funsaver camera competed against nonconsumption. Customers whose
basis of comparison was to have no photos at all were delighted with the quality
of this solution to saving their fun. Creating a purpose brand for a disruptive
job differentiated the product, clarified its intended use, delighted the customers,
and thereby strengthened the Kodak brand.
Marriott Corporation has done the same thing by developing
a brand architecture that is consistent with several different jobs its customers
experience in life. This architecture has facilitated the creation of new disruptive
businesses, while strengthening the Marriott brand at the same time. Under the
endorsement of the Marriott brand, we have been taught to hire a Marriott Hotel
when the job is to convene a major business meeting, and to choose a Courtyard
by Marriott ("The hotel designed by business travelers for business travelers")
when the job is to get a clean, quiet place to work into the evening. We learned
to hire Fairfield Inn by Marriott when the job is finding an inexpensive place
to stay as a family, and Residence Inn by Marriott to find a home away from
home. The Marriott brand remains unsullied by all of this, because the purpose
brands make the job clear.
In contrast, if Marriott marketers had positioned Courtyard
hotels in a segment defined by a lower price point-a cheaper, lower-quality
solution to the same job that the top-tier Marriott-brand hotels are hired to
do-then the disruption could indeed have damaged the Marriott brand. But if
a crisply defined purpose brand guides customers to hire the various hotels
to do very different jobs, and if the hotel chains each are designed to do their
respective jobs perfectly, then they all will be viewed as high-quality hotels,
thereby strengthening the endorsing power of the Marriott brand. Brand strategies
that make it easy for customers to make the connection between a job that arises
and the product they can hire to do the job perfectly can make disruption all
the easier.
The Dangers of Asking Customers to Change Jobs
At a fundamental level, the things that people want to
accomplish in their lives don't change quickly. This is why in our disruptive
innovation research, the trajectories of improvement that customers can utilize
in any given application or tier of the market tend to be quite flat. Given
this stability, an idea stands little chance of success if it requires customers
to prioritize jobs they haven't cared about in the past. Customers don't just
"change jobs" because a new product becomes available. Rather, the new product
will succeed to the extent it helps customers accomplish more effectively and
conveniently what they're already trying to do.
Let's test the viability of a new-product idea by exploring
the potential for digital imaging to create growth by disrupting photographic
film. How did most of us use photographic film prior to digital photography?
We wanted good shots, so we often took multiple pictures of the same pose, in
case somebody blinked at the wrong instant. When we dropped our film off at
the developer's, most of us ordered double prints. If one of the pictures turned
out well, we wanted a spare easily available to send to a friend or relative.
We brought the photos home, flipped through them, put them back into the envelope,
and put them into a box or drawer. About 98 percent of all images were looked
at only once. Only rare, conscientious people went back and mounted the best
photos in an album. Most of us wanted to maintain good photo albums and intended
to do so, but the fact was that we just had higher priorities.
Some digital imaging companies then came along with interesting
propositions. "If you'll just take the time to learn how to use this software,
you can edit out the red-eye in all those flash pictures that you only look
at once" was one. "You can now keep all your pictures neatly arranged and sortable
in online photo albums" was another. It turns out that the vast majority of
digital camera owners do neither of these things. Why? Because they weren't
prioritizing those things before. Innovations that make it easier for customers
to do what they weren't already trying to get done must compete against customers'
priorities. This is very hard to do.
Digital camera owners use their cameras for jobs they already
had been trying to get done. For example, most of us use such a camera to verify
on the spot that the image is good, and if it isn't, we delete it and try again-the
same job as taking multiple shots on film of the same pose. And we send digital
images much less expensively and conveniently to far more people over the Internet
than we ever had been able to do when we ordered double prints. (Interestingly,
have you noticed what we do after we've looked at an image that has been e-mailed
to us? We click "close," putting it back in some "envelope" on our hard drive.)
The things we prioritize in our lives are remarkably stable.
Another example: Hundreds of millions have been spent to
apply new technologies-the Internet and e-book displays, specifically-to reshape
the college textbook industry. Innovators have attempted to develop and sell
tablets that can display downloaded e-books. And with many textbooks, you can
click on a URL to obtain far more information about the topic than could possibly
be included within the limits of a book. Would we expect these investments to
generate significant growth? Our guess is that they will not. Although we would
like to believe that all undergraduate students are rigorous seekers of knowledge,
the job that many college students are really trying to get done, from our observation,
is to pass their courses without having to read the textbook at all.
These companies have spent a lot of money helping students
to do more easily something that they have been trying not to do. It would probably
take far less money to create from the same technology a service called "Cram.com"-a
utility that would make it easier and cheaper for students to cram more effectively
for their exams. This would likely work because cramming is something that students
already are trying to do, but with marginal efficacy. There are a lot of textbook-avoiders
on campuses-a huge market of nonconsumption.
After logging on, Cram.com would ask subscribers what course
they need to cram for-say, College Algebra. Then it would ask which of this
list of textbooks the professor expected them to have read by now. It would
ask them to click on the type of problem that they are having trouble with,
and it would walk them through a tutorial.
The next year, Cram.com would need to offer a new and improved
service, one that made it even easier and faster to cram better-inching up from
the least-conscientious to the sporadically diligent tiers of the student population.
After a few years, two students might be overheard in the college bookstore
anguishing over the exorbitant price of a textbook: "You know, my brother took
that course last year. He's a good student, but he never even bought the book.
He just used Cram.com from the beginning of the semester, and he did great."
Bingo. A new-market disruption that helped customers achieve what they already
had been trying to do.
Identifying disruptive footholds means connecting with
specific jobs that people-your future customers-are trying to get done in their
lives. The problem is that in an attempt to build convincing business cases
for new products, managers are compelled to quantify the opportunities they
perceive, and the data available to do this are typically cast in terms of product
attributes or the demographic and psychographic profiles of a given population
of potential consumers. This mismatch between the true needs of consumers and
the data that shape most product development efforts leads most companies to
aim their innovations at nonexistent targets. The importance of identifying
these jobs to be done goes beyond simply finding a foothold. Only by staying
connected with a given job as improvements are made, and by creating a purpose
brand so that customers know what to hire, can a disruptive product stay on
its growth trajectory.
1. See, for example, chapter 7 in Dorothy Leonard, Wellsprings
of Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
2. Some researchers (for example, Joe Pine, in his classic
work Mass Customization [Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992]) argues
that ultimately segmentation may be unimportant because individual customers'
needs might be addressed individually. Although this is conceivable, getting
there will take some time. We will show in chapters 5 and 6 that in many circumstances
it is not possible. Segmentation, in other words, will always be important.
3. We are deeply indebted to two of our colleagues who
originally introduced us to this way of thinking about the structure of markets.
The first is Richard Pedi, CEO of Gage Foods in Bensenville, Illinois. Rick
coined for us the language "jobs to be done." Independently, Anthony Ulwick
of Lansana, Florida-based Strategyn, Inc., has developed and used a very similar
concept in his consulting work, using the phrase "outcomes that customers are
seeking." Tony has published a number of pieces on these concepts, including
"Turn Customer Input into Innovation," Harvard Business Review, January 2002,
91-98. Tony uses these concepts to help his firm's clients develop products
that connect with what their customers are trying to get done. We are also indebted
to David Sundahl, who as Professor Christensen's research associate helped formulate
many of the initial ideas upon which this chapter was built.
4. Many of the details in this account have been changed
to protect the proprietary interests of the company while preserving the fundamental
character of the study and its conclusions.
5. The language in this paragraph reveals a nested system.
Within the overarching job to be done are many unique outcomes that need to
be achieved in order for the job to be done perfectly. Hence, when we use the
term outcome in our work on segmentation, we refer to the individual things
that need to be done right, such as lasting a long time, not creating a mess,
and so on, in order for the job to get done right.
6. One can see this problem even in the recent marketing
trend toward so-called markets of one. Markets of one drive companies to provide
customization options that meet all the needs of individual customers. But customization
comes at a price. What is more, it often does not provide an understanding of
the underlying outcomes-driven logic of customer purchasing decisions. Because
market research tools as sophisticated as geocoding pay attention to the attributes
of people, they cannot yield market segmentation schemes that make sense to
customers-each of whom has many jobs that he or she is trying to get done. There
actually is a lot of commonality in jobs to be done within a population of people
and companies, suggesting that targeting markets of one may often not be a viable
or desirable marketing objective.
7. The observation that customers search across product
categories to find ways to achieve needed outcomes is grounded in psychological
research, which demonstrates that our perceptual systems are geared toward understanding
what we can use objects to do and whether they are optimal for such purposes.
For example, psychologist James J. Gibson, widely respected for his research
on theories of perception, has written about "affordances," a concept that mirrors
what we term "jobs" or "outcomes." According to Gibson, "The affordances of
the environment are what it offers. .., what it provides or furnishes, either
for good or ill." Gibson asserts that we see the world not in terms of primary
qualities, like being yellow or being twenty-four ounces by volume, but in terms
of outcomes: "What we perceive when we look at objects are their [outcomes],
not their qualities. We can discriminate the dimensions of difference if required
to do so in an experiment, but what the object affords us is what we normally
pay attention to." What matters about the ground, for example, is that it provides
us a platform on which to stand, walk, build, and so forth. We don't "hire"
the ground for its color or moisture content per se. The affordances of products,
in Gibson's terms, are the outcomes that those products enable their users to
achieve. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127.
8. Finding a "killer app" has been a holy grail of innovators
ever since Larry Downes and Chunka Mui popularized the term in Unleashing the
Killer App (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998). Unfortunately, much
of what has been written on this search has simply comprised accounts of historically
successful killer apps. We think that a rigorous study of such applications
would show that they were killers because the product or service was squarely
positioned on a job that a lot of people already were trying to get done-the
innovation in question simply helped them get it done better, and more conveniently.
9. The firm headed by Mr. Ulwick that we mentioned in note
3 has proprietary methods for categorizing job-defined markets and measuring
their size.
10. This information was recounted to us in a July 2000
interview with Mickey Schulhoff, who worked for over twenty years as CEO of
Sony America and served for much of this time as a member of Sony Corporation's
board of directors.
11. We must emphasize here that we have absolutely no inside
information about any of the companies or products mentioned in this section,
nor have we conducted any formal market research on these products or jobs.
Rather, we have written this material simply to illustrate how theories that
are constructed on circumstance-based categories about what products will connect
with customers can bring clarity and predictability to what historically has
been a hit-and-miss task in innovation. It may very well be, for example, that
given RIM's strategy of emphasizing sales to enterprises rather than individual
customers, it is the corporate CIO manager who has the job to do: being sure
that the firm's knowledge workers are able to communicate and be contacted on
a real-time, no-excuses basis. The same exercise would be useful if applied
to this job.
12. As this book was being written, in fact, RIM and Nokia
announced a partnership through which Nokia will license RIM's software to enable
wireless e-mail on Nokia's phones-a deal that makes sense for both firms because
in many ways their products are hired to do the same job. Whether one would
prefer to produce the BlackBerry that ultimately will compete against wireless
phones to do this job, or whether it would be better to provide the software
inside others' wireless phones, as the new Nokia-RIM arrangement provides, is
a question that the theory in chapters 5 and 6 will address.
13. We have gone out on the end of a very long limb in
making these statements, because the future has not yet happened. We have presented
this analysis provocatively in order to illustrate the fundamental principle.
In all probability, the makers of wireless hand-held devices will engage in
a headlong rush to incorporate every competitor's latest features on their products,
leading the industry very prematurely to a situation in which products are undifferentiated,
commoditized, one-size-fits-all solutions. When this happens, we urge our readers
not to conclude that "Christensen and Raynor were wrong." We would assert that
although some blurring and copying of features will inevitably occur, the longer
each manufacturer focuses on incorporating those features and functions that
do a unique job well and the longer they position their marketing message on
that unique job, the faster the suppliers of these devices will grow because
they will gain share not against each other, but against other products and
services that get hired to do those jobs. We would also argue that these firms
will preserve their differentiability and profitability longer if they focus
their improvement trajectory on a unique job. The fact that they are unlikely
to do this does not disprove the principle.
14. See, for example, Leonard, Wellsprings of Knowledge;
Eric von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); and Stefan Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of
New Technologies for Innovation (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).
15. In concept, of course, being able to carry one small
device that does everything in a briefcase or purse is something that all customers
would say they want. But it is rare that there are no technological trade-offs
to adding diverse functionality to a product. Software makes it less expensive
to tailor a single physical platform to do a range of focused jobs. Our proposition,
however, is that even in this situation, a company would do better by using
one single hardware platform to market different software-defined, optimized
products that are positioned on different jobs. It is likely that for a long
time electronic devices that combine such a wide range of functionality in the
interests of doing many jobs simultaneously-organize me, connect me, help me
have fun, and so forth-are likely to end up more like a Swiss army knife: a
pretty good knife, terrible scissors, a marginal bottle opener, and a crummy
screwdriver. As long as the jobs that customers need to get done arise at independent
points in time and space, we would expect that most customers will continue
to carry multiple devices until a one-size-fits-all omnibus device can do all
jobs as well as its focused competitors.
16. The experience that Intuit had in disrupting the small
business accounting software market with its QuickBooks product typifies this
situation. Until the early 1990s the only available small business software
had been written by accountants for accountants. Because they defined their
market in terms of the product, they framed their competitors as other makers
of accounting software. The vision that this framing gave them about how to
get ahead of their competitors, therefore, was to engage in an arms race of
sorts: Be faster adding features and functionality in the form of new reports
and analyses that could be run. The industry gradually converged upon undifferentiated,
one-size-fits-all products, into which everybody had appended everybody else's
Intuit's marketers were wont to watch what jobs the customers
of Intuit's Quicken personal financial management software were trying to get
done for themselves when using the product. In the course of doing this, they
observed to their surprise that a large proportion of Quicken users were employing
it to keep track of their small business's finances. The job, they learned,
was basically to keep track of cash. These small business owners had their fingers
in every dimension of their business and did not need all of the financial reports
and analyses that the prevailing software providers had cobbled into their products.
Intuit launched QuickBooks at this job that small business owners needed to
get done-"Just help me be sure I don't run out of cash"-and succeeded spectacularly.
Within two years the company had seized 85 percent of the market with a disruptive
product that lacked most of the functionality of the competing products.
17. Theodore Levitt has been a leading proponent of this
view among those who research and write about issues in marketing. Christensen
remembers that when he was an M.B.A. student he heard Ted Levitt declare, "People
don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." In our
words, they have a job to do, and they hire something to do the job. Levitt's
best-known explanation of these principles is found in Theodore Levitt, "Marketing
Myopia," Harvard Business Review, September 1975, reprint 75507.
18. For suggestions on how the magnitude of job-defined
market segments can be measured, see Anthony W. Ulwick, "Turn Customer Input
into Innovation," Harvard Business Review, January 2002, 91-98.
19. We are grateful to Mike Collins, founder and CEO of
the Big Idea Group, for his comments that led to many of the ideas in this section.
Mike reviewed an early draft of this chapter, and his thoughts were extraordinarily
20. One reason that some (but not all) "category killer"
retail formats-companies such as Home Depot and Lowe's-have been able to disrupt
established retailers so successfully is that they are organized around jobs
to be done.
21. Because many marketers inadvertently and over time
tend to segment their markets along attribute-based categorizations of products
and people, it is unfortunate, but not surprising, that they often do to their
brands the same thing that they have done to their products. Brands often have
become omnibus words that don't do well any of the jobs that customers need
to get done when they hire the brand. Because most advertisers want a brand's
meaning to be flexible enough for a range of products to be housed under its
umbrella, many brands have lost their association with a job. When this happens,
customers remain confused about what product to buy to get the job done when
they find themselves in a particular circumstance.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press.
Excerpted from The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and
Michael E. Raynor. Copyright (c) 2003 by Clayton M. Christensen; All Rights


text:
If Orel Hershiser could dig through his socks drawer and find the baseball used to record the final out of his record-breaking 59-consecutive scoreless inning streak in 1988, what would it be worth on the open market?
We might have known this week, but it's not to be.
By mistake, the Dodgers' Cy Young Award winner had that ball slip into a personal collection of uniforms, bats and other things commissioned to Grey Flannel Auctions to sell off to the highest bidder. That sale ends Wednesday.
When Hershiser realized what happened, he talked the company into having it retracted. Even though it was already in their catalog, and bidders were already salivating.
But then again, is that really the genuine article?
Didn't the ball that fell into the glove of Dodgers right fielder Jose Gonzalez in the 10th inning at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego disappear into the stands?
We checked in with Hershiser, a serious sports memorabilia collector since he was a kid, to find out what's really going on here:
QUESTION: What's behind having the 59th scoreless inning ball pulled back from auction? Was it because you had mixed emotions about letting it go?
ANSWER: What happened was, I wanted to go through all my stuff and put some of it up for auction, not leave it all for my kids someday to look it over and say, `What do we have here?' So I started to say, `I can part with this, I can part with that.' But when they came and went through all my storage units, they ran into a ton of stuff. I didn't know exactly what they had. I didn't know what I even had. They took it back to organize it, and I forgot that the 59th scoreless ball was in there.
Q: You didn't see it in the list of things they gave you to approve?
A: They sent me 75 letters to authenticate, and I just ran through and signed them all without reading through each letter. So then I heard the ball was not only up for auction, but already in the catalog. I should have known. I just wasn't keeping detailed records because I was selling so much stuff.
I'm keeping the Cy Young Award. My World Series ring. All these key things I've kept for my kids - including the 59th inning ball. If I'd have known it was in the lot and really paid attention, it would have never made it there.
They went through the expense of itemizing it and authenticating it, and I'm like, `No, no, no, no ...'
Q: If we remember correctly, (Dodgers manager) Tommy Lasorda tells the story about how Jose Gonzalez, the right fielder who caught the last out at San Diego, actually tossed that ball into the stands. Lasorda uses that as an example of how careless someone can be with a piece of history. Is that true?
A: He's wrong. The game he's remembering is when Fernando Valenzuela got his 20th win (in 1986) in Houston. There's a fly ball to center field. Gonzalez caught it. Game over. He runs in, but a kid in center field says, `Throw me the ball!' He turns and throws the ball into the stands at the Astrodome. So Fernando is now standing on the mound thinking, `Oh, my God.'
So I know the story about Gonzalez and Fernando's 20thwin ball. Two years later, Gonzalez catches that last out for the scoreless innings record. All that I'm doing when I am on my knees on the mound, smiling and looking at him, is thinking: `Bring the ball in ... bring the ball in!' And he did. I have the ball. He did not turn and throw that one.
Lasorda is mixing up stories. And he's told so many stories, are you going to tell him he's wrong?
Me neither.
Q: What eventually leads to you, or other players, to sell items that would seem to be something you'd never want to part with? Are you worried about security?
A: First, it's sitting in a storage unit and it's not out in my house. Second, it has a significant value that can go to use to other people in my family. It can be invested properly, given to charity. And I don't want to leave my kids any headaches, either. I'm 53 - I know it probably seems a little early - but I collected a lot. I'm not trying to make money, I'm trying to make my estate a little more nimble. So (my kids) can have the Cy Young Award, the last-out jersey, the rings ... and they can say, `Dad cleaned all this up, and I can have five items, and he can have five items ...' And it's nice. My idea is: Let's make it tidy.
Q: That 59th-inning ball ball was originally listed as having a $2,500 opening bid. There are other things in the auction - your glove, a Sport Magazine World Series MVP trophy, a game-used home jersey from the '88 World Series ... Were you tempted to pull anything else back?
A: There is one ball in the auction that was used in the (59scoreless-inning) game (starting at $500). I pulled balls from the bag that game that I had used, and that is one of them. During the game, I'd tell the clubbie: `I don't know what's going to happen at the end of the game, but make sure during the game you're pulling six balls that I've thrown in case something happens.' I've always been into memorabilia and collecting. I'd never tell my teammates I was doing that (pulling balls). All the clubbies know the inside stories.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Clubs and Student Organizations
Social Work Club
The mission and purpose of the social work club is to foster a safe learning environment to anyone interested in the social work profession and its primary function of advocating for persons living in the micro, mezzo and macro level. The Hawaii Pacific University Social Work Club would like to provide the community support which will come from the Social Work Club.
The Hawaii Pacific University Social Work Club is a student-lead organization designed to provide students with opportunities to connect with other social work students and the surrounding community. Activities and fundraising events provide an environment to learn about community outreach organizing, empowerment of the self and for others, social self-awareness and the impact these experiences can have for students at Hawaiian Pacific University, all people of this island and our global cohorts.
The Social Work Club shall strive to empower members an opportunity to create strategies they believe can improve social injustice and promote an environment where students are working towards a common goal of raising awareness. The Social Work Club shall strive to continue to promote this club organization through Hawaii Pacific University to honor the cultures and community by learning about the diversity in Hawaii as a window to the world, and of itself. The Social Work Club shall strive to reach out to the collective cultural populations of Hawaii (Homeless, Children, Young Adults, Elderly, Foster Care, Disabled, Veterans, Native Hawaiians, Micronesian, and all people of the Islands) to raise awareness for all people's impasses in life while developing skills in community outreach. The Social Work Club shall strive to support the students within the Hawai'i Pacific University Club community and commit to working with other clubs of different majors and fields in promoting teamwork and networking.
Sarah Wangit
Social Work Club President
Austan Vance
Social Work Club Co-Vice President
Kerri Robbins
Social Work Club Secretary
Lindsey Ostrowski
Social Work Club Treasurer


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Results 1 to 9 of 9
Thread: Sleeping position
Threaded View
5th August 2012 04:00 AM #1
- Join Date
- Aug 2012
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Sleeping position
Hi! Is there any suggested sleeping position for pregnant mums that would not affect blood circulation for the baby? (Aside from NOT lying on your tummy, of course.) Because I know being pregnant means having to consider sleeping positions when sleeping. Thanks!


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Ted Simons: Good evening and welcome to "Horizon." I'm Ted Simons. Former Maricopa County attorney Rick Romley had a distinguished military career. He retired from the marine corps after suffering severe combat wounds in Vietnam. But his injuries didn't stop him. Besides becoming county attorney, he also ran a retail business, was a founding member of a partnership for a drug-free America, and was named the national disabled veteran of the year by disabled American veterans. Robert Ashby served proudly in the military as one of the original Tuskegee airmen. He also distinguished himself in life later after the military. He was the first African-American pilot to fly a commercial airline and he's traveled the world, helping to raise over $2 million in scholarship funds. Both Romley and Ashby were named to the Arizona veterans hall of fame society for their achievements after their military service. Here now are Rick Romley and Robert Ashby. Good to have you both on "Horizon." That you so much for joining us.
Both: Great to be here.
Ted Simons: Bob, let's start with you. Let's get personal here. Why did you go into the military?
Robert Ashby: Well, World War II came about and we had to make a decision. You were either drafted and assigned wherever the service felt they needed, or you can select where you wanted to go and after viewing all of the possibilities and so forth, and the air force, you fly on a mission and at the end of the mission, you come back to a bed. So it was a no-brainer for me. [Laughter]
Ted Simons: Rick, let's go to you. What about your decision?
Rick Romley: I can't top that one. I was relatively young. Starting out and I was going to Phoenix college and in my first semester and I was so unfocused and I realized it and one of my very good friends, Thomas Shafer, who I grew up with in the valley, he was not as focused as well as he should have been and we decided, let's take a couple of years and go into the military and even though Vietnam was going on, I -- I don't think we recognized the seriousness of that decision and we chose the marine core.
Ted Simons: When you were a kid, did you play army or think -- when you were a kid, did you think army, firefighter, army?
Rick Romley: Yeah, I mean, it was wearing a white hat and I do believe the military, to this day, they -- they are -- they are selfless in their service to this country. And I guess I wanted to wear that white hat a little bit.
Ted Simons: Bob, how about you? When you were a kid, did this occur to you that this was an option or did it gradually come into view?
Robert Ashby: No, it was nothing I even thought about. I would see a plane flying overhead or in the movies, because I had no -- you know, contact with anything of this type. Never been near an airplane. But I determined that, hell, if anyone else can fly, I can fly. So I elected to go and fly.
Ted Simons: What about reaction from family?
Robert Ashby: My mother supported me and everyone supported me really well.
Ted Simons: No one saying you're nuts, don't do this?
Robert Ashby: No, they felt I was mature enough with what I was going on in my life at that time, they felt I made a good decision.
Ted Simons: What about your family, Rick?
Rick Romley: They were very much opposed. Very worried about Vietnam. The news media, although it had been there, they thought it was a very, very bad decision.
Ted Simons: When you went in, did you see yourself spending a long time? Did you see yourself maybe having a military career?
Rick Romley: I thought it was a possibility. But I was -- I think that during boot camp, I was offered officer candidate school because I did real well on the tests and those things. And I went in as enlisted and they told me I had to make a commitment for five years and I chose not to so I guess I didn't look at it as long term.
Ted Simons: How about you?
Robert Ashby: When I went in, the war was going on and I thought this was going to be something just primarily during the war and that was it. But I got to love flying so much and after the war, and I was given the opportunity of having a career in the service, I elected to stay in and have a full career.
Ted Simons: Interesting. Let's talk about individual -- what happened during your military service. Rick, I want to get to you in a second here. You experienced obviously racism in the military. It was inbred in the time you were serving. How glaring was it and how did it change over time?
Ted Simons: Well, it was very glaring at that time. All of our training, the Tuskegee airmen were trained at one base. In concept, a black base but the commander of the base had to be white and the instructors, being we did not have black pilots previous to this, the instructors teaching us to fly were white also. Those fellows were ok. The base commander -- and it seemed like this went on for sometime throughout the military during the '40s, they were so concerned with the segregation, on this black base we had separate drinking fountains.
Ted Simons: Mm.
Robert Ashby: We had separate eating facilities and this got to be such a boiling point, that finally, they got rid of the commander we had and they brought in a commander who I considered an outstanding individual and he came in, changed everything, made it a base that everyone cooperated and did everything together.
Ted Simons: But it was still an all-black base?
Robert Ashby: It was still an all-black base.
Ted Simons: The idea of taking orders from white military superiors, that had to rankle a little bit.
Robert Ashby: It did, but we realized we didn't have anybody in that rank category. We were trying to move up to that status because we were kept down so long and so this evolved gradually that we got fellows with promotions and everything that they assumed command responsibility.
Ted Simons: Rick, your military experience includes some serious injuries. Talk to us about what happened, as well as you can and as much as you want to and the recovery process. I want to know about the physical and the mental too.
Rick Romley: I was in the infantry. I was a squad leader and it was April 7th, 1969, I got wounded. And we were doing a sweep right out of DA NANG, because it had been rocketed regularly and compromising the operations out of the airport. And I had a reinforced squad and it had gone well and then the day changed dramatically and we hit a bad area and I lost six of my men and one died in my arms and I stepped on a land mine and it changed my life dramatically, and the results were significant. I mean, I -- I eventually lost both legs above the knee. Hit in the right arm with major damage and in the abdomen and I was in the hospital for a year and got gangrene. And it was a very, very difficult time. But not just physically. Physically, at the very beginning, but mentally, it is probably a little more difficult. I'll never forget, Ted, I finally got back to the states and I had to stay in the Philippines and then Japan and got me back to the states, because I was so bad. But when I got to Balboa naval hospital, my sister eventually came, I overheard her say outside the door -- I was very skinny, like a concentration camp survivor and I heard her talking, what is he going to do? Sell pencils on the street corner? It was an awakening for me but got my back up some. And I talked to a lot of veterans, combat wounded veterans nowadays and tried to talk to them about the psychological side but I'm a very firm believer that, in a way, this won't make any sense to you, I know it won't, but I'm stronger because of my war injuries, it made me focus in my life. I know I have a strength inside of me, so when difficult times come about, I know I can handle it. And you know, I think I'm a better person from it. As crazy as that sounds.
Ted Simons: It sounds crazy, but the way you put it, I mean, you have experienced something that made you what you are. And Bob, I want to ask you, as well. The military, maybe not in that kind of a dramatic fashion, but the military made you what you are. Did you find yourself after military service looking at the world differently? Looking at the rest of us in the workaday world differently? Did you find yourself -- do you still find yourself a military person?
Robert Ashby: Yes, I do. Because the military instilled certain traits in you that you carry on throughout your life. And timing is one. And my wife, she made reference to that quite often, but all of my life has been timing. Flight, you take off at a time, you're at a target at a time. Every place you're assigned to go, there's a time for it. Commercial aviation, you take off and land on time. Timing really took over my life. And -- timing really took over my life and I appreciate it.
Ted Simons: Rick, when you returned with the injuries, with the rehabilitation and all of that entailed, you are still a military guy and even now, you're still a military guy.
Rick Romley: Very much so. I -- there's a self-discipline that comes with being in the military. Timing. A way you do your life. I get up early in the morning. I don't use alarm clock. Probably the best example of me being able to show my military with me, I raised my two boys on my own. And boy, every Saturday, we'd get up. We had certain chores, there's a regimented schedule we'd have to do and they tease about it today. But both of my boys, even though I was so severely wounded they both joined the marine corps as well. Which surprised me. Because they saw what war can do. They saw providing that service to a country can be difficult. But I think that -- I mean, I like to think, I would like to think that my children saw something in me that made them say, I want that characteristic. I want that trait in me and so they joined the service.
Ted Simons: Yeah, gentlemen we're just about out of time. Quickly, yes or no. Would you do it over again?
Robert Ashby: Yes.
Ted Simons: Even with the discrimination, the whole nine yards?
Robert Ashby: Yes, I would do it again.
Ted Simons: Rick, how about you?
Rick Romley: Yes, absolutely. Even with the injuries.
Ted Simons: Even with the injuries?
Rick Romley: Yes, I like myself. I believe -- I believe in service. I think that's -- that adds meaning to your life.
Ted Simons: Gentlemen, it's been a honor and pleasure to have you both on the program.
Robert Ashby: Thank you.
Rick Romley: Thank you.


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Sales of Square Enix games during the first nine months of the financial year were down 28 per cent on the same period the previous year.
Operating income also took a tumble, down 58 per cent.
It's all down to low console game sales and tough comparisons. In the first three months of the 2009 financial year the Japanese company launched both Dragon Quest IX and Final Fantasy XIII.
Highlights, though, included Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 and IO Interactive's divisive Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, both of which became million sellers.
Looking to the future, Square Enix outlined the raft of games it launches during Q4 � January 2011 to the end of March.
PSP game Tactics Ogre Let Us Cling Together (25th February), 3DS game Puzzle Bobble 3D (3DS launch period), Final Fantasy spin-off DISSIDIA 012[duodecim] (spring 2011), Tomb Raider Trilogy pack (25th March), The 3rd Birthday (spring 2011) and Final Fantasy IV Complete Collection (spring 2011) will all launch.


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Destination Weddings, Photo
Contact Info
Robyn is AMAZINGReviewed on 10/12/2014 Kelly G
Robyn is amazing! She is so talented and professional. Wedding's can get hectic and there can be time constraints, and Robyn remains calm and keeps everything running like clockwork. Her photographs are amazing! She goes above and beyond...at our wedding she could tell I was... Read More getting stressed because there were issues with my bustle and Robyn said, "I'm going to bring you a beer!" LOL. She is awesome and I highly recommend using her for your special day!
Stunning workReviewed on 6/04/2013 Jennifer E
We got so lucky to have Robyn capture our special day! Her photos are absolutely stunning. She was such a pleasure to work with. She was very responsive to my emails and calls. She included an engagement session in our package, which allowed us to work with her prior to our... Read More wedding day. Robyn is so sweet and her work can't be beat!
Amazing photographer!Reviewed on 4/16/2013 Elizabeth D
Robyn and Natalie were both wonderful to work with and so much fun. Our family and everyone in our wedding party all raved about them and specifically let us know how much they appreciated their easy going, calm disposition. They were both patient, not pushy, yet they captured... Read More all of the photos we requested and more! We so appreciate that every moment throughout the evening was snapped, yet they were rarely seen. Striking that balance is an art and we so appreciated all of their effort and hard work! Plus, the photos are stunning! Not one bad photo was taken with the expertise of Robyn!
great memoriesReviewed on 10/01/2012 jason a
Robyn was great to work with for both our engagement photos and on our wedding day. She has a number of great locations around the city that can fit into whatever style the bride and groom want. in addition, once you are taking the pictures she is so good at working with the... Read More couple and the area to get the best shots. We just started to look over the pictures she shot from the wedding and they are more than we ever could have hoped for. Years from now when all we have to remind us of the day are the photos we are going to be lucky to have had such a great photographer!
Amazing, amazing, amazing...Reviewed on 7/04/2012 Gina B
When we met Robyn, her genuine excitement for us and for our wedding was so evident. She's the kind of person you meet and automatically feel like you've known forever. She was amazing every step of the way. After we had so much fun taking our engagement pictures and saw the... Read More beautiful shots that Robyn captured, we knew we had made the right choice. I also ended up doing a boudoir photo session (eek!), which I never would have had the guts to do if Robyn wasn't taking the pictures! One of my girlfriends from work also had a wedding coming up and we had so much fun together drinking champagne, getting our hair and makeup done (all set-up by Robyn) and then putting our bachelorette gifts to good use! The pictures turned out so tasteful, definitely something I was excited to give to my guy! And then came the wedding ... Robyn was the perfect combination of fun and professional. (Make sure you pick a photographer that you love their personality as much as their work - they're with you and your bridal party the WHOLE day!) She kept my crazy bridal party in line so that we she could get the shots she knew we'd want and did it in a way that made sure everyone was having a good time. She knew the best spots in town to get amazing shots and added the cutest touches. And all the while we were having a good time smiling and posing we had no idea she was capturing treasured moments and candid shots. When we got the proofs back (which she got back to us so fast!!) we were amazed at what the images actually looked like. The depth and the textures of the places we were looked unbelievable through Robyn's lens, it's going to be so hard to narrow down the pictures for our album! We were so lucky to have Robyn with us throughout all of our wedding planning and look forward to having her by our side for all our milestones ahead!
Gorgeous photography, wonderful experience!Reviewed on 2/15/2012 Jeri H
My husband and I can not stop recommending Robyn Rachel Photography to engaged couples, whether solicited or not! Our experience with Robyn was delightful from the very start, and we feel lucky to now consider her a friend. Her warmth and genuine excitement for our wedding made... Read More us feel completely comfortable throughout the entire process, and the resulting photos far exceeded our expectations. Robyn's style was that perfect mix of absolutely stunning portraiture and stylistic photojournalism that we were looking for - a combination we found was quite rare when looking into other potential photographers. Robyn and her fearless second shooter (he literally laid down in the street and climbed onto a roof to get those perfect shots for us) captured the essence of the day's emotions so beautifully, and provided us with photos that truly allow us to relive every special moment.
PhotographerReviewed on 8/17/2011 Leah C
My sister used Robyn last year in Chicago and she did such an amazing job that I flew her out to Seattle for my own wedding. She's really fun to work with and it is quite obvious she loves her job and liked the challenge of working in a new place. Her photos are amazing and made... Read More us look beautiful.


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The Fire Element
Chakra: Ten petal Manipurna (lustrous gem) chakra
Animal: Dragon
Dynamic: Yang, active, masculine.
Color: Yellow
Emotion: Anger, passion.
Sense: Sight.
Taste: Pungent.
Energetics: Overcomes inertia; moves upward. Transforms and transmutes raw material into energy, light, power, and warmth.
Lessons: Wemust align ourselves with the Divine. "Personal will must not be inconsiderate, manipulative, abusive, or selfish." (Dr. Farida Sharan). Transformation and change are a natural part of evolution.
Positive earth energy: Fire is used for transformation, healthy digestion, excellent sight, willpower, accomplishing goals and directing vision.
Imbalanced fire energy and challenges: Anger, jealousy, power strugles, manipulation, domination. Too much is destructive. Too little creates apathy.
Healing of fire energy: Saunas, sun bathing, sweat lodges, nutrition, exercise, moxibustion, heat treatments, fasting, and massage. Positive fire energy allows for joy, laughter, and creative transformation.
Location in body: Digestive organs.
Imbalances can be factors in digestive difficulties, heart attacks, diabetes, heat and energy imbalances. Excess can cause liver and gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, and stomach problems. Shortage creates an inability to digest food, a dampness, cold, general apathy and lack of energy. Absence of passion. And an inability to transforma and change.
Fire essential oil recipe:
Orange (6 drops)
Rosemary (3 drops)
Black pepper (2 drops)
Marjoram (1 drop)
Basil (1 drop)
Lime (1 drop)
Cinnamon (1 drop)
*The FDA has not evaluated the statements on this website. The information presented here is for educational purposes of traditional uses and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any diseases.


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Bacon Explosion: New Flavors On Sale Now
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The BBQ Addicts have release two new flavors of Bacon Explosion! If you've ever bitten into a Bacon Explosion and thought "This is fantastic, but it would be even better if it had *insert favorite ingredient*", then you've come to the right place. Starting today, we now have our brand new Jalapeno Bacon Explosion and Cheese Bacon Explosion available for purchase right here on BBQ Addicts.
These new flavors are the same great Bacon Explosion recipe that the world has come to love, but with the addition of a few enhancements. Nestled inside that juicy layer of smoked sausage is now a hearty serving of fresh jalapeno peppers or creamy American cheese to match the crispy bacon pieces that give Bacon Explosion is trademark "pinwheel" appearance. That's right…you're getting the exact same amount of porky pleasure that our Original Bacon Explosion delivers, but now with more POW for the exact same price! Head on over to our store to pick up your 3 pack sampler today.
But wait…that's not all. Since you're now buying Bacon Explosion in bulk, you're going to need a reliable (and stylish) way of toting around all those meat logs. Lucky for you, we're also rolling out our brand new Bacon Explosion Pig-Porter.
Paired with one of our pre-smoked Bacon Explosions, the Pig-Porter is the perfect gift for bachelor parties, birthdays, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, client appreciation gifts, or even a surprise "thinking of you" care package. And when you're not hauling around a load of pork, the Bacon Explosion Pig-Porter also dubs as a wine/liquor/40 oz tote to keep your favorite beverage chilled.
Our Bacon Explosion Pig-Porter is made from a high quality insulated neoprene, so no matter whether you're hauling around a hot or cold Bacon Explosion, you can rest assured that you'll arrive at your destination with your pork at it's desired temperature.
The Bacon Explosion Pig-Porter is sold and shipped separately from The Original Bacon Explosion line of meat products.
how about the best of both worlds; a jalapeno/cheese bacon explosion…
Been doing it with homemade hot sausage, jalapenos and pepperjack cheese since I first started making them. Just finished two today for appetizers before my turkey went one to the smoker: One hot one as above, and one gentler, sweeter one for the kiddies. Awesome.
add some Frito corn chips to the center…perfection perfected


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Saint-Gobain Tygon Ultra-Chemical-Resistant Tubing, Formula 2375
Use this tubing in highly regulated industries such as food and beverage, hospitality and institutional cleaning. Saint-Gobain Tygon Formula 2375 Chemical Resistant Tubing offers an unequaled combination of chemical resistance, clarity and flexibility.
Manufacturer: Saint-Gobain AJK00003
SpecificationsDescription & Specifications
- Chemical-resistant tubing for food and beverage applications
- Virtually unaffected by acids, bases, ketones, salts and alcohols
- Outstanding chemical resistance
- Non-DEHP for high purity
- Plasticizer-free for low extractables
- Safer disposal - Releases no harmful and corrosive hydrochloride gas
- Smoother inner surface - Provides better flow and inhibits particulate buildup
- Low sorption - Minimizes cross-contamination
- Clear tubing for easier and better observation
|0.063 in.
|50 ft.
|0.188 in.
|0.0625 in.
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A raft of personal bests over the pre-season have indicated that Richmond's footballers will attack 2014 both faster and stronger, yet key defender Alex Rance believes playing smarter holds the key to improving on last season's bittersweet finals return.
As the Tigers set their sights on seeing back-to-back September action for the first time since 1974-75, Rance admitted missing All-Australian selection last year after a season widely hailed as being worthy of the honour was a personal spur, but would always be overshadowed by the broader drive for team success.
He sees making smarter decisions - individually and as a group - as the key to maximising the foundation laid by another powerful pre-season.
"We know we've been a really fit side compared to other teams, but it's about using that smartly - making smart decisions, because over the course of the game everyone's going to fatigue and that's going to accumulate, and that's when you start to make errors," Rance said on Wednesday at the Tigers community camp in Warrnambool.
"I've always thought that I'm quite decent at defending one-on-one, but it was the offensive brain fades which Dimma (coach Damien Hardwick) calls them that I would get in trouble for a bit, where I"d turn the ball over and cost us one or two goals a game.
"If I can minimise that to one goal every couple of games, then I save us two or three defensively, that's going to be a win. That's definitely one thing I'm focusing on this year."
Rance has been pleased with his progress on a decision-making level in the Tigers' simulated match practice over summer, where he has worked on not simply winning the ball but putting himself in situations to use it positively.
"It's another year in the game style, another year being predictable to your teammates, knowing where they're going to be, and not making it up as you go - knowing already what's going to happen, how it should unfold."
Scott Thompson, Harry Taylor, Corey Enright and Michael Johnson took the tall defensive spots in the 2013 All-Australian team, with Rance describing them as fantastic players who "were definitely above me". He didn't think about selection last year, but imagines such a gong would be warm reward for effort.
"It does give me added impetus to really try harder and work on the deficiencies that I have in my game. It probably is a little bit of a driving motivation, but I'm more looking to the team success and play a few more finals than those individual accolades."
He will attack the season in the time-honoured fashion of one game at a time, yet with a particular eye to avenging a personal low of 2013, when Travis Cloke kicked seven goals on him in Collingwood's round four win.
"The game last year that sticks in my mind is Trav Cloke, it'd be nice to even the ledger a bit there.
"It's never nice playing on all those big forwards, they're strong men and they're the icon of their team. It's always a difficult task."


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