101. Learning To Build: A Conversation with Bob Moesta

Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call the Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at hbs, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful.

Hello and welcome to the Disruptive Voice. My name is Katie Zandbergen and I'm pleased to be your host for this episode. Regular listeners of this podcast will know that earlier this month we released our 100th episode. Looking ahead, we've decided to feature a number of themes that will focus on a specific framework, industry or circumstance. Along these lines, we'll start today with the first in a series of three episodes centered on Jobs To Be Done. Given this, we could think of no better guest to bring onto the podcast than co architect of the Jobs to Be Done framework with Clay Bob Masta. Bob is an entrepreneur at heart and an engineer and designer by training. Bob has in fact worked on and helped to launch more than 3,500 new products, services and businesses across nearly every industry. Bob is currently President and CEO of the Rewired Group, a company he co founded in 2009 that specializes in demand side innovation. Bob is a lecturer in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He's a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, which is the think tank dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation. He's lectured at both Harvard Business School and mit, and he was a great friend and colleague of Clay's. Furthermore, Bob is no stranger to the Disruptive Voice podcast, where he's been a very welcome guest a number of times before, and speaking on such topics as spotting non consumption, conducting jobs interviews, and why we hire religion or higher education, along with episodes that take a deeper dive into the application of jobs theory. Most recently, Bob came onto the podcast to discuss a book that he and Greg Engel published in 2020 called Demand side Sales 101 Stop Selling and help your customers make progress. In that episode, I mentioned that rumors had it that Bob was working on a forthcoming book. Well, I'm happy to report that the rumors were true and that Bob has in fact just published a new book called Learning to Build the five Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs. He's in the studio today to discuss the new book. Bob, welcome to the disruptive voice, Katie.

Thanks for having me back. And, boy, that's an introduction that, like, I don't even reflect on that. That's like, I don't know who that person is because I'm just a regular guy from Detroit who likes to make stuff.

Well said. So diving right into the new book.

Oh, yeah.

Why did you decide to write it?

Oh, so, first of all, I have four children, and I had four kids in five years, but they're 28, 26, 24, 23 as they moved out. It's one of those where it's like, you start to clean out. And it turns out that I have 847 notebooks of everything I've worked on throughout my entire career sitting in the attic.

Treasure trip.

Well, more like where's the dumpster? And so my wife basically said, no, you should probably look through them and figure out what you want to do with them. And I'm like, I really don't want them. But as I started to dig through them, I just started to realize, like, okay, there's a lot of stuff here that I need to pass on. And the other thing I realized is how important mentors are. And being a dyslexic, illiterate kid from Detroit that was told to be a baggage handler at the airport when I took my career test at high school, I look at it as I was more of a vessel or a receptacle of all these people's learnings and teachings. And then I've melded it all together, but how do I actually pass it on? And so part of this is a homage to my four mentors who have just changed my life, and that I can't pay it back to them, but how do I pay it forward? And so this is sharing my story, but also sharing those extraordinary people I worked with. What do these people have in common, and what are the things that they did that are kind of different or unique that people can't really see or touch? And they'd say, oh, yeah, they're an entrepreneur or they're an innovator. And so it was kind of dissecting that and pulling that back. And I started with, you know, 10 things. And I got the seven things, and I got the three things, and I brought it back to five. What I think are kind of bedrock skills that if you look at somebody or you try to build a company, you're trying to build a product, what are those things you really need to have that aren't really kind of explicit?

I want to get to the five skills. But first, a question about your mentors. And Clay, of course, was one of your mentors. And in the book, you wrote of your partnership saying that Clay was the theory builder and you were the practitioner.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship and how he came to be one of your mentors?

Yeah. So I think the craziest thing for me was Clay had just been at Harvard maybe a year or maybe a year and a half or so, and we were here talking to somebody else about some work we were doing, and they told us to introduce ourselves to Clay. And one of the things, when we went and to talk to Clay, we basically asked him, how can we help? And he paused and sat back and kind of looked, and he didn't have a tear, but it was like, basically said. I said, what did I say? He goes, I've been here for almost two years, and nobody's really ever asked me that. Everybody's always asked how I can help them, but nobody's asked how somebody can help me. And so we went on and just. He told us about his research and what he was doing, and then we would go find people and examples, and so we would go out in the world and find what he was trying to research and trying to find people who were in the middle of being disrupted or in the middle of the innovator's dilemma. And then eventually it would be one of those things where we became sounding boards. And I'll say my greatest gift is questions. I'm really good at asking deep questions because I'm pretty ravenous about unpacking and peeling back the onion. And so Clay always appreciated the depth at which I would push. And it was a little bit, I'll say more Detroit ish. And so it was a little abrupt. But the thing is, Clay realized that it was more important for us to have one on one time. And so we would spend a lot of time together, and I would literally say, like, I don't understand, or what do you mean by that? And so it just kind of grew into a great relationship where I would say, start as a teacher and a mentor. But there was a point where he basically told me, like, you know, I'm not your mentor anymore. We're peers. And I could never comprehend that. And at the same time, once he saw me as a peer and I saw him as a peer, which I don't think I ever did, but we were able to collaborate as opposed to him guiding me. And so I wrote an article with Whitney Johnson called getting the mentoring equation. Right. And it was about this whole notion of realizing that when you're a mentor and a mentee, there's a big gap in knowledge, and that the mentor is there to help the mentee make progress. But at some point when they get closer together, most mentor. Mentor relationships break apart because they're not learning from each other. But the moment that we became peers is when we actually started to build Jobs to be done theory and other things like that.

Very cool.

So, and I would say that I didn't ever think Jobs to be done was a theory. I just knew it was a practice, and so I would do it. And Clay eventually basically said, we need to turn that into a theory. And I'm like, I have no idea what that means, but love to do that. So. And the rest is history. That's how we're here.

So the subtitle of your book is the five Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

I'm wondering, do you define innovators and entrepreneurs separately, or do you see them as being one and the same?

So in the book, I separate the difference between an inventor and an innovator. Right. Primarily because there's a lot of difference between somebody inventing a new way to do things, and I think of innovation as affecting society. It's having scale. So a segue is an invention, but birds is an innovation because it's actually helping many people get around to do other things, though they're both in the same category. But ultimately, I think the difference between an innovator and an entrepreneur is an innovator usually starts with a set of resources or starts with a business, or they have a set of things and they're innovating on top of the business already, where an entrepreneur is more starting with nothing. And so they're both innovators, but one is starting from nothing, and the other one is trying to build from something that already exists. That's how I look at it.

So back in 2019, I was lucky enough to hear your guest lecture at HBS entitled the Five Skills of an Innovator, which became the foundation for learning to build.

That's how I usually do it, is I do talks, and the talks I refine for a couple of years, and then eventually it turns into a book. That's my process.

Yeah, I remember you saying that the five skills encompass a range of hows. It's how to see the world, how things work, how people work, how to learn, and how to put it all together. So before we dive into the five specific skills that you're waiting.

They're waiting, though. They're desperately.

They're waiting. They're coming, they're coming. But I'm curious to know, how do you respond to people who tell you that the key traits and skills of great innovators can't be learned, but rather that great innovators and entrepreneurs are born with the characteristics that they need to succeed in the space?

If you start to dig deeper and deeper into how really good innovators became innovators or really good entrepreneurs became entrepreneurs, they have a curiosity, they have a humbleness. Those kinds of traits are part of it. But I think a lot of it is socialized. You know, Todd Rose wrote a great book around dark horses, which is basically people who come out of nowhere in an industry and reset an entire industry, but they started somewhere else. And so I feel like it's more like the skills we learn and the context we're in enables us to be innovators. So I don't know if people are born that way, but my mom would tell you I was born an engineer for sure, but I'm not sure she would say I was born an innovator. I think at the same time, I think I learned a lot of it along the way, and my disabilities actually created super abilities. And so that's why I think it's more about ability than it is anything else, because at some point, we realize that we can learn so much. So I think it's a learned trait, not a born trait.

Okay, so let's get into it. Can you first briefly walk us through the five skills? What are they?

So naming them was really hard. Very hard. Like, I actually had working title for all of them because I didn't know how to describe it, and I wanted it to be a little bit different than everything else or more to be able to help articulate what I meant by it. So the first skill is called empathetic perspective. And this is where innovators and entrepreneurs can see things from other people's perspectives or other perspectives simultaneously. And they can see it empathetically, meaning they might not agree with as finance sees it or as the customer might see it, but part of it is being able to understand how do they see it and how do we reconcile. And so they almost can see around corners. They can anticipate problems, and they have a very good mind's eye of how things are seen. And so, as you see with my hands, I'm literally. I take it and almost like I have a globe in my hand and I'm literally spinning it. Because it's like a really good person with empathetic perspective can see a problem or a situation from multiple ways and multiple views, which allows you to kind of have so much bigger perspective on something, which is, I think, half the battle. Most of the time, we're either so myopic or so focused, or we're too almost like pie in the sky. The second one is uncovering demand. Most really good innovators and entrepreneurs realize that they don't create demand. Demand has created inside people. And it's about struggling moments and how do we actually understand how to find those struggling moments to uncover the demand that's out there and how do we help people make progress? These are people who very intuitively, when you tell them about jobs to be done or the concepts around those, it's like the first time they go, oh, finally I have a language to talk about what I've been thinking. Right. The third one is this notion of causal structures where they are very curious about how things work, and they have mental models in their head about cause and effect, and they're obsessed with cause and effect to the point where they understand the difference between correlation and causation. And so it's kind of like, why do people do what they do? Or how does a camera work in a phone? Like, they're curious about both the mechanics and the optics and the technology piece, but they're also curious about how to sell and how to put an organization together. And they just want to know how things work. The fourth one is, it's actually probably the one that I've surprised the most about, but I call it prototyping to learn. And that I feel the gift I was given by Dr. Taguchi, who was one of my mentors, was learning designed experiments very, very early in my. But using it in a way that was very unconventional and that most of the way designed experiments worked was you would have a hypothesis and then you'd actually use experiments to prove your hypothesis right or wrong. And he would talk about the fact is, especially being a very young engineer, I wouldn't know how anything would work. He says, we're going to run an experiment so you can learn how it works. And so it's using prototypes to learn how things work as opposed to having the theory of how something works. And this is where anomalies come in all the time. Because all of a sudden you say, well, this and this and this should cause that, and it doesn't. And you're like, hmm, why the anomaly? And so I've been obsessed with anomalies forever, but the aspect of prototyping to learn is. It's that aspect of learning through making. I'll say outsiders would say mistakes, but what I would say is they're learning by actually prototyping.

And the idea there is that you're failing early on in the process.

But this is always a misnomer to me. I think you asked me something before we got on and it was one of those things like, you know, when do you fail? It's like, well, I either fail all the time or I never fail because I'm always learning. And the word failure is not part of that vocabulary. And though you can see it as failure, you don't feel it. Failure is a very emotional thing. So when I'm failing, I'm actually smiling because I'm like, oh, what can I learn from this? Right? And so that's really what prototyping learns about. And then the last one, it's a very interesting observation. And this one was the hardest one to pull together because it's this aspect of understanding how to make trade offs and that everybody thinks about having the ideal experience or the ideal product or the ideal conditions. But in the real world there's variation which comes from both Deming and Taguchi. And that ultimately we have to make trade offs and jobs to be done has trade offs in it as well. And so you start to realize that fifth skill is being able to identify and manage and make trade offs and know what to suck at. And really good entrepreneurs understand the five things I need to be exceptional at and the three things that like, I could be okay at. And it rolls. So if I looked at any individual, some individuals have three or four or two of those skills. But when you put a team together and you have all five of those skills around the table, it's magic. It's just kind of amazing and how fast they work and how they're not worried about being wrong and how they're willing to have very different kinds of conversations than typical teams who are trying to be very precise and predictable and things like that. So it was so fun to write. And part of it was going back into my notebooks and seeing stories. I'm like, oh, here's the paint experiment. Oh my God. It was so fun to kind of relive some of that. But I was trying to make sure I could tell stories. It's pretty much written in a storytelling format, but at the same time to realize that, to express how I moved through time and how I learned over time. I end up creating these fictional characters of young Bob and what young Bob was thinking when he was 10 or 20 or 30, and then enlightened Bob, which is when I was on the other side of these skills and going like, oh, I don't need to work that hard, or I don't need to do that. So it was really kind of fun to do.

The five skills are so intertwined. For instance, prototyping to learn allows you to better see trade off. In writing about the skills, how did you ensure that they were logically presented to the reader? And in your opinion, are one or some of the skills more crucial than the rest?

No. So that's a great question. So in the end of the chapters, I do something called an interrelationship diagram, and I talk about this whole concept of the natural priority of the work, which is a lot of times when you make a list of 10 things to do, we'll pick the priority by what's the most important thing or what's the easiest thing, and we let the outside factors determine what the priority is. But the thing that I learned very early in my life was that when you describe anything, there's a natural priority by saying, if I work on this part, does it help me with this other part? And so you start to realize that as you draw the five skills and you say, if I work on empathetic perspective, does that help me with uncovering demand? Well, yeah. Does empathetic perspective help me with causality? Yes. So I put them in the sequence of learning based on what I call the natural priority of basically how interdependent they are. Again, another concept that Clay is very well known for is interdependent modularity. So I made them modular, but what I did is I described and presented them in their interdependent way. Clay's obviously had a lot of influence in me.

Yeah. And speaking of Clay, in the book you wrote, my friend and mentor, Clay Christensen, had a framework for causal mechanisms called disruptive innovation. Can you elaborate on that?

So Clay had all of these skills, Right. I remember him talking about, like, you know, the people at Digital Equipment, like, they were the smartest people in the world. And he could empathetically go, like, they were smart. They knew what they were doing, and how. How did they not see these things? And then he would then dive into the causal mechanism of it. Right. And so that whole aspect of he was always, always trying to find the cause and effect and what causes the disruptor to come in and what causes the incumbent to actually be disrupted and being able to be curious about what are those things, and then going and finding data that could help him tell his stories. And so he was kind of, I think, the master of causality in that sense, and at the same time, a master of empathetic perspective.

In the book, you frequently make the point that innovators need to step back and see the big picture or the whole system and not just focus on the narrow problem in front of them.

Yep.

Can you elaborate on the importance of that?

Yeah. So, again, I go back to Dr. Taguchi. The mentors are Dr. Taguchi, Dr. Deming, Clay, and then Dr. Willie Moore were my four mentors. But Dr. Taguchi would always say, engineers, when they focus on problems only, they would have job security because all they do is play whack a molecule. They'd solve one problem and create another problem. And so, like in the book, I talk about this thing where we were working on a paint line for one of the automotive companies, and if you make the paint too thick, it runs, and if you make it too thin, you get orange peel. And they would only measure the problem. And so they would constantly be saying, all right, well, get rid of runs. And then they'd make all these changes, and then all of a sudden, they'd have orange peel, and then they'd get rid of orange peel, and they'd have runs. And they were never actually seeing two sides of the problem. We're actually understanding that this has to do with uniformity of thickness, and the moment we could change the measurement, all of a sudden we could solve the problem. And to be honest, it's one of those things when I'm always thinking about the negative side of something. A run is a negative thing, an orange peel is a negative thing, but thickness is not good or bad. And so the moment I can get to something that is more independent and understanding that if I can reduce the variation of paint thickness, I will have neither of those. And so you start to realize that being able to see two sides of a problem actually gets you to what we call the function.

You also talk about noise factors and control factors. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Again, this is Dr. Taguchi. I was lucky enough to work with him for almost 10 years and work in many, many different capacities in different places with him side by side. And it was kind of amazing. But one of his big distinction was always, how do we actually understand in my sphere of influence as an engineer or as an innovator, what things can I control and what things can't I control? And what are those things that I can't control that influence my system? And he came up with a concept called robustness, which is, how do I set up my control factors in a way that make me least sensitive to the noise factors I can't control? And what you realize is that that very premise is very, very powerful because all of a sudden I can actually start to build something that actually doesn't have very high quality components. But when I put it together in the right way, it actually creates a very high quality, consistent output. And it's part of the Japanese philosophy, one of the things I learned when I was young. And so you start to realize that being able to talk about control factors is it's helping people understand what they really have the ability to set and specify and control versus those things that can cause their product to fail or not work, but they can't control. And most people try to say like, oh, you know what, it's the humidity of the plant that's causing all this problem. And the answer would be, well, we need to air condition the plant. And Taguchi would say, no, we need to figure out how to make ourselves less robust to the humidity change in the plant. And that mindset change is just mind blowing to me.

It's interesting. In learning to build, you also write about the value of time and how when innovating, you give yourself a time wall. Tell us more about that and how it's useful throughout the innovation process.

Yeah, so time wall is one of those things. Well, one of the reasons why it took me so long to finish the book is I've been wrapping my head around this whole aspect of how do I build a graphic that describes what a time wall is? And if you go to the book, it's not there because I just couldn't finish it and I wanted to get the book out. But a time wall is one of those things where it's basically, it's an artificial thing that you create, or it's like a time box is the best way to describe it, that you give yourself the ability to do as much as you can. Within the time box, there's something called the Parkinson's law, which is you will take as much time as you're given to get something done. And if I give you less time, you'll almost get the same amount done. But if I give you two more weeks, you're still going to get the same amount done. And so it Relates to the notion of iteration and reps is that I'd much have two or three reps on something than try to spend three weeks doing something. I'd rather have three one week sessions to rep it. And that time wall is the thing is I'm going to do as much as I can. But the key to a time wall is it forces you to make trade offs. And so I've been working with Ryan Singer, who was head of strategy at Basecamp for a long time. And one of the things he's been talking about is something called shape up and how do we shape the work we're going to do? And the role that a timewall plays is it actually forces you to say, as you're in the middle of a project, it actually grows because there's something called discovered tasks. And most people, when they discover things, they do one of two things. They either want more time or they want to eliminate them. And what this does is it forces you to say, what's the trade offs you have to make? And so for me, I have a time wall. I created an artificial date by which I would pass. I have 1899 days left as of today. And one of those things is that it's forced me to really think about what I want to do. And so part of this is I've been really cranking books out, getting stuff out of my head because I have this imaginary date. But it's literally the notion of, like, if I keep thinking, oh, I'm not going to die till I'm 90 or 100, the reality is I don't have that pressure to make trade offs and what stuff I gotta stop doing and what stuff I need to do more of. And so it's a very powerful concept, but it's one of those things that's very hard to articulate, but it's amazingly powerful. So one of the next books I've already got queued up is called the five Lies. I tell myself to be productive. And the death date is one of those lies. I'm like, if I happen to die that day, okay, if I die before it, I've done as much as I can. And any day after that is a bonus. So like, I've literally created a very emotional barrier that actually is very productive for me. And most people would say, like, my wife would say, like, she hated in the beginning, but now that she understands how we're spending more time together and I'm not doing other things. And it helps me prioritize what's important to Me, which is great.

That makes a lot of sense. And you also talk about a dollar wall as being an effective constraint. Is that a similar idea in terms of the innovation process?

Yeah. I'm inherently a maximizer, which I think is part of being from Detroit. Like, you never ask for more, at least in the automotive company I worked at was like, you got what you got and you got to figure out how to maximize what you have. And so I always feel like a dollar wall is the same kind. If I only have this much money or I have to hit this, what are the five things I need to get right and what else can slide? It's a tool that I use to help me manage and make trade offs. And you start to realize like, we never get to perfect, we never have enough time, we never have enough money. So how do we actually force ourselves to make trade offs? And so I use tools like that to help me do that, to get.

To the good enough.

Yeah. And that's where if you look at most innovations, most innovations aren't perfect. They're never perfect. They're better than nothing or they're better than what was before. And then iterating around good enough will get you there. And so to me, I've always learned to say it's the 80s. If one rep gets me 80, the second rep will get me to 96, the next rep will get me to 99. And so three reps is way better than one rep trying to get me to 100, because I'll never get there.

Right. So towards the end of learning to build, you highlight that though the challenge lies in applying all five skills that we actually do so fairly frequently in our own lives.

Oh yeah.

And you then use the example of making dinner.

Yeah.

Can you tell us how these five skills are applied, perhaps unbeknownst to us, while doing something like making a meal?

Yeah. So that's kind of the point, I think, is that we all have these skills already and that the innovators and entrepreneurs really come to a point where they have almost taken those skills to the next level. But like, when you're trying to make a meal or you're planning the week's menu, it's like, well, who's going to be home? Who's going to eat dinner? What do they like? What do my kids like? What do I like? If I just built it for me, I have the time, the kids wouldn't eat it. And if I just ate it for the kids, I wouldn't want to eat it. And so you start to realize you have to be able to look at how we're going to actually kind of make those trade offs. But at the same time I got to look at it through their eyes and then I have to think about, okay, what's going to happen? And I have to understand what does progress mean? Like, if we got hockey one night and we've got another night, we don't have really anything and another night they're off to a birthday party or whatever it was. It was that aspect of being able to kind of play out the week, understand the causation, figure out what's going to happen, and then figure out the trade offs I'm going to make to basically get there. And so we use these skills all the time. It's just when you start to use them explicitly on a day to day basis, you start to realize like all of a sudden it affects everything. This is why I don't believe that an entrepreneur or innovator is born. I think we learn it because it's just skills we inherently have. We all have them.

So we started our conversation today with you reflecting on the jobs we've done that you had in writing the book. Taking a consumer centric perspective. Why do you think folks should hire learning to build?

Yeah, and so in the book, I talk at the end that there's three main jobs of the book, Right? Job one is really about being a lifelong learner. Most people who are lifelong learners will pick up a book and they want to just grab one little cool little thing that they can make their life better. If you're a lifelong learner and it's about like, give me one thing, this is really kind of a fairly easy read because it's in stories. It's giving you a bunch of different concepts along the way. And so this is where like people would pick it up if they're just like, I need a new book because I want to learn something new. Right. Job two, the example I give is a software engineer. Like, I've been doing things, but it just seems harder and harder and it's not all coalescing or coming together. And so it's that aspect of I'm putting a lot of energy in and I'm not getting a lot of energy out. And I feel like I know how to build, but there's some secret I'm missing. And so this is for those people who have built something and it didn't work, or it's way more work than they thought, or it's like, I need to figure out a new approach. And so that's where you can pick up that. And then the third one is really about somebody who's like a manager of a group. And it's really about building the team together and understanding the team. And so we wrote it around this whole aspect of, like, how do I make sure I assemble the team that has the bedrock skills? And so it's where you're doing well, but the fact is, it doesn't feel like we're clicking well enough. And when you start to realize the five skills and what skill might be missing from your team that you got to bring into the group, does that.

Tie into having a common language to speak about things?

Yeah, I think that's always a big issue. I talk about this notion of layers of language, that there's this pablum layer where we can all agree, like, oh, we want collaboration. Oh, we want teamwork. But what does all that mean?

It sounds great.

It all sounds. Well, it's like mom and apple pie. Right. It's that thing we can all agree on. But it's like, when you unpack it, it turns out everybody has a different language to it. And so how do we actually unpack down to that causal thing of collaboration? Means we do this, and it means we don't do this. Like, a lot of times we only talk about what it is, but it's the contrast that actually gives the meaning. And so I think the language is really an important aspect of why I'm writing this. And I'm not trying to put forth, like, this is the answer, but this is more a reflection of my experience to date, and I'm way interested in, as people read it, how to make it better and have better language around it. And I see this as a beginning because as I actually wrote it, it was three times as long as it was, and we pared it back because, again, if we look at the jobs that people are trying to get done with a book, it's very different than a class. And so I'm actually in the process of building some classes around prototyping to learn and about empathetic perspective and just trying to go deeper in those skills. But at the same time, the book is more like an introduction to the overall concepts of them.

Very cool.

Yeah.

So in the book, you also briefly reference the fact that there will be a forthcoming book on the topic of managing one's career.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a bit more about that project and also what else you're working on?

So I'm reconnecting with Michael Horne. And we brought in Ethan Bernstein, who's here at hbs, and we've got Kathryn Thompson, who's helping as well. And for the last five years, Kathryn and I have been basically interviewing people on why they switched from one company to another. So we're using jobs on Jobs. So it's the meta of jobs to be done right.

And these aren't people who've been laid off?

No, no. Even if they've been laid off, how do they choose what to do next? And what you start to realize is that what progress as an employee am I trying to make, or as an entrepreneur am I trying to make? And so it's this whole aspect applying jobs to the notion of, like, the flip that's happened in the last five years is I feel like employees hire companies more than companies hire employees. And when you do that, all of a sudden, as an employee, I'm actually in a pretty good position. But most of the time, I don't know what I want. It's the same thing. It's like, oh, I'd love to have a great team. What does that mean? I don't want to be micromanaged. What does that mean? And you start to realize, like, at some point in time, you have to unpack a lot of this language. And one of the most interesting aspects of it is we just did a class with Ethan today here at hbs, and one of the things that came up was like, well, look, people always talk about they want money. Well, what it turns out is when you peel back the onion, money means respect. Money means I have responsibility. Money is actually a surrogate for something else. And it actually has about eight different definitions and might be able to get respect with a title without necessarily money. How does the money really play into it? And you start to realize that a lot of people end up wanting more money, but they actually don't know why they want more money. And so that's really what this is about, is actually helping to build a process around this. So we've built this research, and now what Ethan, Michael, and Kathryn and I are doing is building the language around helping people define the progress that they want. And how do we actually understand the circumstance you're in so you can decide what's your next move and to be more explicit about what company do you want to hire because of the progress you want to make? And so we're on the fourth chapter. It probably won't be out till, I want to, say, 2024. What is it? Yeah, 2024. Way too long for me. But we're building a time box. Yeah, yeah. Well, the problem is when you have a collaborator and you have a publisher, you only get to work at their paces, not mine. So I can only put a time box on myself, not in them. So I'm humbled to be working with them. They're brilliant minds. And I think part of this is that I have probably 15 or 20 products in my mind of what I could go build. And this first step is really about building the language that will resonate with people in this situation. And so not trying to build jargon, but to build some concreteness around it and then spin off. Like, I've already got two products for, you know, kind of helping people look backwards and find out what gives them energy and what drains their energy and things like that, and helping them frame kind of the progress they want to do. And then I've got another one on the employer side that helps employers realize, like, why do people hire their company and how do we actually understand the job descriptions are really kind of unicorns and how do we actually shape the work to fit the people as opposed to trying to get the people to fit the work? And so some really interesting angles on all that. I'm excited and I would say I never wanted to be in this space, but the reality is like, I tend to run wherever the struggling moments are. And this is a big place where a lot of people struggle. And the funniest thing of all is almost every interview, we've done hundreds of interviews at this point, almost every will say, it just was so random I got this job. It's like just came out of nowhere. And when you actually dissect their story, it's very much caused and it's very predictable about what's going to happen. But part of it is being able to understand how to see the context and understand the outcome and the trade offs they're willing to make. So it's kind of full circle of applying jobs to be done back to the career path.

Wow, that's so interesting. And in learning to build, you talk about planning from right to left.

Oh yeah.

I think you write about it in the chapter on causal structures.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where you think of the left as the beginning and the right as the end. Does that apply also to the new work that you're working on?

Yeah, so everything is about being able to understand the outcomes we're trying to get to. And so it starts with the whole notion of empathetic perspective of what's it like to actually Go find a job now. And to be honest, having been an entrepreneur seven times, I don't really understand what that means. And so getting the empathetic perspective and understanding what it means to do it, being able to uncover kind of what's the real demand for a new work. And one of the things I found out, 38% of the people that we've talked to or we surveyed around this basically said like, how many people would like a new job but haven't really looked for? It's like 38% of the people are ready to quit if they can find something better, but they just don't know how. And this gets back to demand, right? Where's the demand? There's a lot of demand to change, but they don't know where to go. The other part is trade offs is people don't understand trade offs. And so as we think about left to right thinking, which is almost like cause and effect, we read left to right, but I actually think right to left. And so I think about the outcome. And that outcome then turns into outputs, and those outputs then turn into systems, and those systems have inputs. But if I don't understand the outcome, I'm trying to, where most people try to build something, it's like I have these inputs to put into this system to get that output, and then what can I do with it? And so I wrote another book called Demand side Sales, which takes the same approach of how do we understand the progress your customer is trying to make? So we can actually build our sales process to match the way people want to buy based on the progress they want as opposed to the way we want to sell? Same thing. Everything's kind of nested, but at the same time it's applied to very different verticals. I'm a little bit of a crazy thinker, but that's why I'm trying to organize it through books and collaborations with people, because I've been very successful. But in a lot of cases, I have to start to communicate how I think that way. So right to left thinking is one of those things where I know other people have talked about it, but it's like so innate to me that I didn't even realize that's how I did it until I had to explain it to somebody.

Oh, that's interesting.

Like, they're starting at one end and I'm starting at the other end. Like, wait, why are you starting there? And they're like, why are you starting there? I'm like, I gotta know where we're going.

Is this Everyone.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

So what are some resources that you can recommend to those listening who would like to learn more about some of the topics that we've touched on today, including the jobs to be done framework and it's vast applicability to innovation.

So in the book I have lots of resources because I realize I might be introducing people to a lot of the topics, but I think there's a lot of work between Deming and Taguchi and the quality movement back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of the foundation for me. And so any one of Dr. Deming's books, any one of Dr. Taguchi's books, like the Intro to Design of Experiments, you know, Deming's out of Crisis, there's a lot of different work there. It's old, but it's one of those things where as you put a new slant on it, you read it and see it in a different way. It's one of those things. I actually had an intern one year just read the books into a tape so I can listen to them every year. And I listen to them and I hear different things every single year. It's kind of fun, I think, for empathetic perspective. The interesting thing there is that it's really about the arts and teaching people how to play roles. And so one of the things I suggest for people to learn better empathetic perspective is go take an improv class, go become a character in a play, go learn how to do something that's not you, and you start to realize, like, it's actually kind of fun. But at the same time, most people who are like, as an engineer, the last thing you want to do is go on a stage. I would say I'm an introvert more than an extrovert, but the reality is I've had to become an extrovert and play the role. And so in my office I have very large paintings of clay and Deming and Taguchi and Dr. William Moore. And to be honest, I literally play their role. Like, what would clay do in this situation? And what would Dr. Taguchi do in this situation? So it's very helpful to have this notion of being able to play these different roles and then start to see things from different perspectives. The trade off one is kind of the hardest one because you have to almost have the other four to get to trade off. Like, as I started to research how to help people with it, there's a lot of optimization methods and analytical things, but there's not a whole lot around the qualitative gut feel aspect. And so helping to frame trade offs and tools like the time wall and the dollar wall and things like that, where I realized there's not tools is where I'm searching to find or build new tools to help there. But I would say the things that are here aren't new. People have talked about them for ages. I've just kind of wrapped them in my own rack and through my life experiences to kind of share and like I said, pay it forward. And by no means am I trying to take credit for any of it. I'm trying to just basically say as a vessel of these wonderful people and all these different experiences, this is how I see and try to help entrepreneurs and innovators.

It's a great book and I look forward to the ones that are coming down the pipeline. As a last question, do you have any advice, thoughts, comments, comments that you'd like to share? Anything that we haven't touched on yet today?

I think the aspect is that I keep going back to we're humans, right? And as much as we want to make things very concrete and almost analytical and predictable, especially with things like AI coming down, the reality is there's way more unknown than there is known. Taguchi would always say there's way more unknown than there is known and never forget it. And I just remember him like pounding this at me. Right? It's one of those things where to be humble enough to realize I might have done something last week but things might have changed and I don't. And so I think the reality is focus on making progress, realize that we're human and there's nothing ideal and we gotta make tradeoffs. I think that's the real message of the book, but that's the message of all my books and all the things I write about and talk about. And I would always say that being dyslexic is the greatest gift I ever got, that I would never wish upon my children. But at the same time, that disability created some unique super abilities in me and to find your own superabilities and to help you figure out the work you really like. So that's why I'm now going down this other path, because I just feel like, how do we help people who are not technical and not innovators, but how do we help people find the work they love?

So it's all about making progress, helping other people do things.

Exactly. Period. And so I think one of the biggest things is I miss Clay every day. It's just, it's hard to think he's not here because I feel him every day, especially being here on campus. Yeah, I see this behind you and everything. It's just very. It's emotional, to be honest. And at the same time, I've adopted his single greatest metric, which is the number of people I'll help. And so I'm pushing myself harder and harder because I only have 1,999 days left. And if I can help one more person learn something different, I'll be measured by the number of people I've helped. And so I've really taken that to heart so much that it's bothering my wife a little, because sometimes it's like I'm taking phone calls at 11 at night because I'm talking to somebody in Singapore or something, but. But, like, if I've got the time and I'm not asleep, I want to help. So it's good to be back here, but it's also. It's bittersweet.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your insights and for your time today, Bob. I've really, really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for having me on. And this is just. It's a joy to be back. And thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. Until next time. Good luck, everybody.