Clay Christensen: 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 you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you’d like to hear more about, or if you’d like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the School.

Derek: Hi, I'm Derek van Bever and you're listening to The Disruptive Voice. We're here today in the studio with Bob Moesta and Andres Glaser, two expert practitioners of the theory of “Jobs” to be done. “Jobs” is a central framework that we teach here at HBS in Clay's course, which is called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise or BSSE for short. The “Jobs” approach seeks to understand the causal drivers behind why consumers choose to purchase or hire, in our language, as well as to fire products and services and it's very useful to entrepreneurs and managers of all kinds of businesses. Bob Moesta will be familiar to listeners of the podcast. We sometimes refer to Bob as the Milkshake Man because he worked with Clay in the infamous Milkshake Research Project that put “Jobs” on the map. Andrew Glaser is the chief strategy officer for American Signature and Value City Furniture companies. He's one of the hand full of practitioners that come to Bob's mind when Bob is thinking of people who have generated deep insight into this approach. Full disclosure: I thought Bob was the most committed evangelist for the “Jobs” framework that I had ever met until I met Andrew earlier today who uses the “Jobs” approach every single day. Our hope for today's conversation is that our listeners will learn how much honest work goes into mastering “Jobs” and how rewarding it can be. Fair warning: if Andrew's experience is any judge, once you see “Jobs”, you can't unsee it. So if you're listening, get ready for the ride. Welcome, gentlemen.

Andrew Glaser: Thank you.

Bob Moesta: Thank you, Derek.

Derek: Andrew, like a lot of evangelists, I guess, you came to “Jobs” the hard way. You came to appreciate its usefulness after you had racked up some failures. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Andrew Glaser: I love that we're starting straight with the "Hey, nice to meet you. Let's talk about all of your failures."

Derek: Exactly. We are rolling.

Andrew Glaser: Perfect, let's get right into it. Hello, everybody. Let me talk to you about my failures. I think two areas in my career come to mind in a big way. I was a hedge fund investor for about a decade ... equities, retail consumer. I ran a start-up. I had certainly success in the hedge fund industry but at the same time, there were some struggles in areas that I felt that I could not invest in or missed but couldn't explain why I missed them. Certainly if there was a product to be launched, in the future, say, an iPhone and I didn't invest because I couldn't predict what people would do in that situation, whether or not this would be a breakthrough product. Anyone that did not buy Apple stock in 2007 is probably in the same boat. Or, a product that was already launched, Amazon, same thing. So many people did not buy that stock and being able to predict that. There was definitely struggles there. I did have a start-up called Club Crown. It was a golf start-up that allowed people to customize the top of a driver or three wood. It was an incredibly cool product. I brought it ... we'll get into that laugh in a minute, I'm sure. It was an incredibly cool product. I brought it to the PGA show. I put it in front of customers. I won Best in Show. It was all over the Golf Channel. People were telling me how this was the coolest thing and this was going to be everywhere. Retailers were telling me the same and it didn't work.

Derek: So let me understand. Club Crown ... the idea here was that you could put a transparency like your Harvard shield or your club or whatever you wanted on the top of your driver.

Andrew Glaser: That's right.

Derek: What's not to like? Why was that not just a runaway success?

Andrew Glaser: We're getting pretty much straight into “Jobs” and the notion of well, it was cool. We thought we did all the right work but I think we're getting straight into what we call an innovation paradox. The paradox is that people are terrible at predicting their future behavior. People are terrible at providing accurate causal mechanisms for past behavior. In this particular case, I would show it to people and they predicted their behavior that they would buy it. They told me that again and again. Then awards told me that again and again and caused me to then invest more of my own money behind it. What in the world happened? What in the world happened? That was ... it bothered me. I came up with theories but it's about coming up with what really happened here that bothered me for a long time.

Derek: What was it? What ... ultimately, why did people not buy it?

Andrew Glaser: It comes down to the crux of “Jobs”. If there's no struggling moment, there's no progress to be made. There's no innovation.

Derek: Could you stay on that for a second? That was a lot of language you just laid out. If there's no struggling moment, there's no progress to be made. Bob, you're smiling like the Cheshire Cat. What ... translate that for us.

Bob Moesta: Humans are... we're people of habit. We'll do the same thing over and over again. We might see something cool but the reality is, are we really going to actually fit that into our lives? When you start to realize I've got to give my driver to somebody else, for a period of time, for them to put that thing on it. Oh, by the way, it has to be perfect and if it's not somebody else has to ... you have to take it off and put it on. There's a whole bunch of other things you have to do. It's like, I don't want to lose my driver for data, to basically have that put on. So you start to realize that there's a lot of inconvenient things along the way. All of a sudden there's no real get for what they have to give up. To me, there's no real struggle, which means as much as they say it's cool and they'd love it, they're never going to find time in their life to fit it in there.

Andrew Glaser: There's a second aspect to it, to compound the issue, was that this had to be installed. People at a shop had to learn a new process to install it. The struggles ... it was a huge anxiety on that side of "Am I going to mess this up? Do I have ... That was a ... Do I ... How fast do I have to do it? What's the speed at which the customer is going to expect this? What do I get out of it? Then there was a huge behavior change because club makers often have very dirty hands and just creating the behavior change and getting them to wash their hands because this was an adhesive ... an advanced adhesive, but still an adhesive ... was just ... that little behavior change that sounds so simple was extraordinarily difficult.

Derek: For all of the BSSE alumni in the world who are listening to Andrew and remembering Chet Huber's experience at OnStar and what a mess it was to try to put OnStar installation into the dealer channel, I think you're hearing, again, that same importance of understanding that the channel is aligned on the same job that the manufacturer is trying to promote. Bob, anything else that we should pick up from this?

Bob Moesta: No, I think the aspect here is that, again, as Andrew rightly named it the paradox of consumers actually can't tell you about the future and they can't tell you about the causal mechanisms. So when you count on them to give you feedback for your product, you end up over-investing in the wrong things. To be honest, you end up not being able to make the business work. Part of it is being able to actually really understand what progress people are trying to make and where those struggling moments are is critical.

Derek: This is a really tough paradox. In the absence of this theory of “Jobs”, I've got data on the past and what people have done. I've got surveys where people tell me what they will do. And you're saying that neither of these things is helpful in my trying to figure out what is the path for my product or service.

Bob Moesta: The data is usually at the wrong level so it's kind of like when you walk into the doctor's office. They take your temperature. They measure your heart beat. They might measure your breaths. That doesn't talk about how healthy I am. It doesn't actually talk about the underlying causality of why I might be sick. So all of a sudden we might be collecting data ... Clay and I talk about this all the time ... We actually usually end up measuring the things that are easy but not necessarily meaningful. Part of this is we have a lot of data that's out there but it's not necessarily meaningful to this endeavor. The other part is, for some reason we think that because we can't predict the future, if we just ask consumers to predict the future, they can do it better than us. The reality is, this is where ... some work we've done with Todd Rose and some others ... you start to realize the fact is that a larger sample size doesn't actually give you a better answer to a bad question. Right? If I survey everybody's who's going to have dinner next Tuesday night, eventually it's like chicken will come up. If I have enough people say chicken, boy chicken is going to be there on Tuesday night. But that's not what causes people to have chicken on Tuesday night. Part of it is, is that we confuse correlation and causation. Causation requires great attention to detail and basically patience to basically find it.

Derek: I think for our alums who are listening to this podcast, we've got you exactly where we want you. You're back in the classroom remembering how we talk about the challenges to implementing “Jobs” and the fact that the data that is so abundant is not very useful to you and adding more data doesn't make it any more insightful. Andrew, back to you. So you had been through your hedge fund experience. You'd been through what I take was probably a fairly disappointing experience with Club Crown. You talked about a light bulb...

Andrew Glaser: That's all, Derek.

Derek: You talked about a light bulb moment where you came across “Jobs” theory. Could you tell us about that?

Andrew Glaser: Sure. A number of years back there was an HVR article "Know Your Customers' “Jobs” to Be Done," written by Clay and a number of other of your colleagues. In it, it talks about ... they mention Bob and some work he did on people that are downsizing to a condo from a home. He came up with some insights that just blew me away. It literally ... my head exploded when I saw this. I was like, "How did ..." He had the notion that his job was not just to build condos but to actually move people's lives and how the dining room table played a role in that. Then how he ... to me it was like, "Oh my God, someone solved this paradox. I need to talk to this person." Because everything that I did in my prior two careers ... the hedge fund career and the start-up career ... all the struggles ... some of the most principal struggles were in that paradox. I didn't know how to deal with it. As soon as I saw it, I said, "Okay, someone has figured this out. I need to go get as close as possible to this person, because they know how to do it." That's when it really happened that I went down this rabbit hole that I thought was a foot deep and it's been miles.

Derek: Bob, when we were talking earlier this morning when we all convened in my office, Andrew was reflecting on how challenging it was, how creative it was, for you in the course of doing all these interviews with people around this topic of downsizing, how the dining room table didn't jump out of the conversations. You had to pull it out of the conversations. That's both, I suppose, encouraging and disheartening. Talk to us about that experience and help us understand what was the significance of the dining room table here.

Bob Moesta: The hard part to me is the fact that, for me, I don't pretend to understand anybody's story. When I go to do interviews, it's literally like an empty vessel, a blank slate, an empty page. It's like I have no idea what caused you to sell your home for 30 years and move into a condo or try to move into a condo. Ultimately, to hear that story, the thing is I might have heard some in the past but I don't know theirs. I don't know ... I always think of it as dominoes. I think Ryan Senger says it best. "If we understand those little dominoes and understand the domino effect, the small things." A domino, half the size, can knock over a domino double the next one. If you think about it, I can actually line up a bunch of small dominoes and by the end it's like, "Yeah, I'm going to move." What are those little things that build the snow ball?

Bob Moesta: To me, it's finding that energy and what things help them make progress and what things hinder their progress. As you start to hear their stories, this notion of the dining room table came up as things like "Well, we had a lot of stuff and we had to get rid of a lot of stuff because we couldn't fit all the furniture in." Then you'd hear things like "Well, so what furniture did you need? What were you going to keep and why were you going to keep it? What furniture did you get rid of and how did you get rid of it?" Part of it was some people weren't ready for it. They wanted to put it in storage. But this dining room table thing came up because it was the way we actually designed the condo. It didn't have a formal dining room. What they would rather have was a bigger second bedroom, almost a suite, to accommodate the fact that when the kids came back, they'd have a place for them to stay. So sacrificing the dining room actually created a place for that to come out even more. They didn't actually know where to put it. But you heard it once or twice and you didn't think much about it. Then as you started to layer the stories on top of each other, all of sudden you start to realize there's a really big anxiety here of what to do with the dining room table. People who got rid of the dining room table were ... They were actually ... They were more free to actually move than the people who didn't. Then you started to understand the emotional bank account of it. So you started to probe on the next set of interviews. It wasn't about accumulating but it's more like I might have missed it on the first couple. But as you hear it, it's like, "Oh, there's a source of energy here that I maybe have missed and let me listen for it."

Derek: What is the significance of the table?

Bob Moesta: The table is, if they don't know where the table's going go, they're not going to move. At some point, the dining room table, to your parents, represent the emotional bank account of every holiday, every birthday. In some cases it's been passed two or three generations. They're not going to put it in the basement. It's not going to go to Goodwill. It's not going to go out to somebody. It's literally who's going to take it? Because if I don't know where the dining room table is going to go, I don't think I can move.

Derek: So...

Bob Moesta: It's not... the crazy part is it's not an explicit thing. It's just more about a behavioral thing of saying "Oh, my niece, Sarah, finally took the dining room table and then we could move." It was like a liberating thing. Wait, what? You just didn't understand it. But from a dominoes perspective, it's like that domino fell so then they could actually feel more confident about moving. But it was like there was nothing really else that was as emotional as that dining room table.

Derek: If you're a builder, you're focused on the what. We want granite counter tops. We want the second home office. We want all these features in the house. Then you're coming in with this approach and asking why. Why are you stuck? Why have you been able to move? That's where you hit on this insight.

Bob Moesta: It's a difference between what they explicitly asked for, which was a bigger second bedroom and bathroom. We cut it down and built a dining room, a small dining room where it could go. Then we got an increase in sales. The whole notion was we went against their premises. It's no different than Ikea where they talk about the fact that if you ask anybody do they want to put their furniture together, the answer is no. Right? But the fact is, people are willing to do it when they need it in a certain amount of time or they need to have something in stock. Or the fact is they only have a certain budget. Part of it is the trade offs people are willing to make. Ideally, they don't want a dining room. Ideally, they don't want to put their furniture together, but that's not life. Life is full of these trade offs.

Derek: Fantastic.

Andrew Glaser: That's a big deal in that ... from an innovation perspective. No data was going to tell you. What question were you going to put in a survey to know that the dining room table was a thing? There's no chance. There's no data that's going to get you there. Then, to have the confidence ... based on these conversations ... to do something that seems completely irrational, which is cut a bedroom in half. Make it barely big enough to fit a dining room table. Probably you could barely put people in there. And have an increase in sales? What are the chances?

Bob Moesta: So there's two things I want to make sure we clarify. One is, we prototype it. We're not changing every plan everywhere. We're literally taking one of the units and basically saying, "All right, we're going to cut this down. We're going to do this. We're going to build it out and see what people think." The aspect is this. This is where prototyping comes in because it's so important. The reality is that, again, the only way I'm really going to learn these things is through prototyping and saying "I don't know. Let's go collect some data around it." That's the thing. Without the freedom to actually try new things, you're never going to solve these problems.

Derek: So Andrew, you read about Bob's experience and the proverbial light bulb went off. You said that you wanted to do this right away. You wanted to learn how to do this approach, so you actually reached out to Bob, I guess?

Andrew Glaser: On LinkedIn.

Derek: Yep.

Andrew Glaser: That's right.

Bob Moesta: Yep.

Andrew Glaser: And said I'm the chief strategy officer at this furniture company called Value City. We do a billion in sales. I think you could help us. Would you have a conversation with me? Within a week we were talking on the phone.

Bob Moesta: My favorite though ... and this is one of the little things I want to say is that ... Andrew is chief strategy officer and as you know, most retail is very tight. He has no budget for any of this. The thing is, we're going back and forth and trying to figure it out. He's thinking about it and what he did is, he actually was very creative. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because I think it's very useful. He went to one of his suppliers and said, "Look, we're doing a review of this category. How do we actually get ... we'll do this information and get you to pay for some of it. We'll pay for some of it. We'll split it. A way in which to create budget for it by going to the supply base.

Derek: So you both can benefit from the other.

Bob Moesta: That's right.

Andrew Glaser: Which is a way to pay for it without...

Bob Moesta: I think it was very good for the supplier that chimed in but at the same time, the fact is, it was equally as useful for you guys.

Derek: Before we get to the application of this to furniture, however, Andrew, you said your first project was a pet peeve related to the café?

Andrew Glaser: Yeah.

Derek: At Value City? Talk about that.

Andrew Glaser: I can't get away from this café. I knew that once we did our first product together, for me to retain the framework, the methodologies, the creative ways that Bob came up with for solving the innovation paradox, I needed to do it as soon as possible. Soon before I had done this project with Bob, the care had begun to ... the internal corporate café began to report to me. The next week I literally went ... and that's an area where I was going to have no push back from anywhere in the business. No resistance. I could just go do it. I went and performed a full “Jobs” interviews, work up, internal employees, created innovation ideas off of it that we would go implement within a couple weeks of actually executing a mattress project.

Bob Moesta: So the funniest part is that you're leaving on Friday and you're like, "Okay, I got this. I understand how it's going to help us. I want to do this." I'm like, "What do you mean I?" He's like, "I want to go do the interviews." I'm like, "Okay, go find something that nobody can reject you for." He's like, "The cafeteria." I'm like, "Nope, nobody's going to stop you there." He could literally sit in the cafeteria as people were walking in. What caused you to come in right now? What were you hoping for? Then the people who never showed up at the cafeteria. Why don't you go to the cafeteria? What were you hoping for when you go somewhere else? So just back and forth. Within a week he had all the interviews and it was like, "Now I know what to do."

Derek: I really want our listeners who have come to us with a question that we get, perhaps more often than any other, which is where do I start? How do I start? I've got to get everybody in the organization bought into this new way of looking at things. What you're hearing here, right, is no you don't. You need to find something that is struggling, bonafide struggling, but that no one is going to somehow pull rank or tell you you need to get 10 sign-offs. Someone you can do on your own, end to end, and demonstrate the value of “Jobs”. I understand that worked in the café. What were some insights that came out of that work?

Andrew Glaser: We found that we were over-serving a certain portion of the population. There were two main “Jobs”. One was when I'm having a long day, really help me get a good break from my day and make me feel better about it. That was really more about having something that was comfort food. Something my mother would make for me. That's mashed potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs...

Bob Moesta: Lasagna

Andrew Glaser: And things like that. The other person, it was more of when I want to ... when I'm working really hard and I want to get home. I don't want to take time during the day. I want to get home to see my kids. Help me refuel in a healthy way. The design requirements ... we were massively over-serving the first category and massively under-serving the second category. The second category made up two-thirds of the building. It wasn't a surprise that only one-third of the building was actually coming down to eat.

Bob Moesta: Right. Part of it was being able to play and prototype and make up some smoothies and do some other things just to test. Again, it was a place where there really wasn't much resistance. You could build your pool. I'm going to build a hundred blueberry smoothies this morning and put them out there and see what happens. It was just like, "Oh, boy that worked. Why did that work?" Then just iterating and iterating and iterating.

Andrew Glaser: That's right.

Bob Moesta: That's the cool part. Places like the cafeteria, I've had people do it in the IT support desk. Right? Who doesn't need help in IT? Right? It's like what's the struggling moments? How do we actually understand what they are? What progress are they trying to get? A lot of times, they'll solve the problem but they won't prevent the problem. You can actually use this in IT. I've seen people use this in HR. It's all internal, where they all want help. You don't have to get, like you said, big sign-offs to talk to customers and all that other stuff.

Derek: That's super cool. You said that there's been a big lift in revenue as well as, I take it, profitability and happy employees as well.

Andrew Glaser: That's right. People get to see it, first hand. They see, number one, they're happier. The food's better. Their experience is better. So even in places the food might not be as good but it's maybe faster and they're willing to make that trade off. But they also see more people down there. There's actually more community within the company. We started implementing the changes about a year ago. Sales are up about a hundred percent and gross margin went from about 15 percent to 50 percent.

Derek: Wow.

Bob Moesta: But the design requirements ... this cannot take more than 90 seconds for somebody to grab something. How do we actually make this and design from the moment you're between a meeting and you need fuel to keep you going that you can run down and in 90 seconds fulfill that job and get it done. Again, it's all trade offs. It doesn't have to be delicious. It just has to be sustaining enough so I'm not hungry during my next meeting, or for the afternoon. Part of this is Andrew being able to extract that data and be able to then work with the chef and work with the people in the cafeteria who were ecstatic for the help, I think.

Derek: So Andrew you...

Andrew Glaser: Kind of, kind of. Anytime ...

Bob Moesta: Any change.

Andrew Glaser: Anytime you're changing, there's a lot of apprehension. But in this particular case, I had full reporting responsibility on the area so I was able to do the change management myself.

Derek: Great, great lesson. Please take note listeners. Andrew, you went from the cafeteria to mattresses. Went to the mattresses, as they say. You told us a lot about what's wrong with typical mattress sales. Could you talk a little bit about how “Jobs” is not part of the typical mattress show room?

Andrew Glaser: Yeah, anytime you see a product being sold off of features and benefits, when you walk into a mattress store and you see 40 white rectangles and everybody's' talking about springs and hybrids and foams and coolant something or other and you're going "I have no idea what any of this stuff means," ... anytime you see that you know that they're not thinking in a “Jobs” manner. A great comparison for the mattress industry and what we did is what Steve “Jobs” did at Apple in 1997 when he came back. When he looked at their product line up when he came back and there were 40 something computers, different types of computers. Anyone that bought a computer in the '90's remembers how they sold computers. It was this many gigabytes and this much RAM and this much ... and you're going "I don't know what any of that stuff means. I have no idea. I'm so confused." You try and find someone ... some one friend that's an expert that can come with you to help you buy something that's good but you don't even know what good means. When he got back he said, "Look, there's two things that people are trying to do with these computers and two things only. They're either trying to surf the web and word process or they're trying to do that plus render photos and videos. MacBook, MacBook Pro. For cost differences, here's one that's mobile. Here's one that's not. There's a four box for you and we're done. It was very simple. People actually understood it. It was one of the most, to me, one of his most brilliant strokes of genius that is not talked about nearly enough because it's a big deal. Same thing for mattresses. It was ... it's a mattress for someone else. I want to hit the easy button. Or it's like I haven't been able to sleep in two years. I've tried everything in the whole world. Get me back to sleep. So in the same way, Bob was in the business of moving people's lives and the dining room table. We're in the business of getting people ... giving people their lives back. Because these people were a mess. They were struggling at work. They were struggling with family. Think about what your life is like when you don't sleep. They've been struggling with this for years. Then they walk in the door and what do people say? We have a great sale going on today. What? I am ... think about what I've been through over the last two years of my life. That's your first statement?

Bob Moesta: The craziest part to me is all the other things they had done before they actually finally thought "You know, I think it might be the mattress." It's just this crazy ... oh that would make a lot of sense. But it's no, we've got to get a fan. No, I've got to get a dehumidifier. No, I've got to get a humidifier. No, I need special wicking sheets. No, I need a noise machine. The portfolio of things is so large. Then when they get there, it's almost like going to the doctor. No language which I know nothing about. I'm only going to buy a mattress once or twice in my life. When it's for them and they can't connect the design of the product to the symptoms and the problems and what's going to help me sleep better, it literally is "I'm going to spend as much as I can because money has got to be better so more money is always better." You end up having people do that. But the reality is that they just don't know how to choose. Lots of time you'll get how many people ... it's the non-consumption ... how many people want a new mattress but don't know how to buy a mattress? That's the thing we went after.

Derek: Andrew, when you figure out that it is about sleep not about coils, how does that ... how do you use those insights then to align the rest of the organization?

Andrew Glaser: Great question. The neat part about “Jobs” is that the implementation affects all aspects of the organization. What products should be on the floor? How do you simplify the number of SKU's? We actually took 30 percent of the SKU's off the floor. When these two mattresses do the same thing, whatever it is ... if it's your back, if it's your shoulder, whatever it is ... you only need one for that person type. So you can take 30 percent of the mattresses off the floor which is what we did. That's merchandising. Then you go to in-store experience. You make sure that when the person comes in you're talking to them about what they've been through, what they've tried, and what they're seeking and assure them that they're in the right place. By doing that, you win their trust. Then you can actually put them through a process that's going to fit them to a mattress that's going to help them sleep, versus give them this many coils. It's like fitting a shoe. You wouldn't ... someone that's a size 12 you wouldn't give them a size 9. How do you come up with the right system that fits a size 12 to a size 12 to make sure that they sleep well? Then you go to marketing. You start to talk about why we're set up to do that. It's almost like ... it might be your mattress when you can't sleep. Think about that. The easiest way to tell, for most people, is go sleep at a hotel. Anyone that sleeps better at a hotel is going to go. That's the last domino. It's the mattress.

Bob Moesta: What I love is what you came up with. How many Z-Quil do you need to take before you realize it's the mattress?

Derek: Is that like an ad?

Bob Moesta: That's what we've talked about.

Andrew Glaser: We've talked about it.

Derek: Interesting

Bob Moesta: But there's this clear sign that's okay your mattress isn't working. Again, they don't know. So part of this is building awareness just to the fact that it might be time for a mattress. Then how do you afford a mattress? There's a whole bunch of other stuff around it. But it's that combination of marketing differently. It's merchandising differently. It's making it easy for them to choose. Understanding and connecting to value. There's a whole bunch of pieces that they end up moving around.

Derek: I want to, in the balance of our time, I want to now go down to periscope depth and, Andrew, you were talking earlier today about “Jobs” is a concept that you understand through experience. You understand through practice. There are some do's and don'ts about interviewing that strike you as the different between success and failure. Could you talk about some of the things that you've learned in doing “Jobs” interviews that you now would teach if you were teaching somebody else?

Andrew Glaser: I think there's definitely a few parts to that answer. Number one is ... I'm just going to go through how I would think about an interview ... number one is learning how to get someone to trust you. These interviews become very detailed on your emotional past, on your social goals. It's very psychological. A lot of people feel like it's therapeutic like they're with this psychologist. You get to these break throughs on these simple things. You need to create a lot of trust in that moment, especially at the beginning to get people to open up to you. Learning how to do that is really important. Then when you get into the interview, going with a beginner's, learner's mindset of saying "I don't know anything about what's ... I don't have any predetermined notions about what this person's trying to get out of whatever product it is we're talking about." Sometimes that will come off, for example, in questions that seem almost silly, almost like you're in kindergarten, what my nephew might ask. Why is whatever? So if someone says, "Oh that's comfortable," you don't move on. That's a huge trigger for me. Whereas it would get lost to someone else. Where I'm sitting there, "Whoa, whoa, we've got to stop. What does comfortable mean?" Just that word, depending on the person, could take 10 minutes. Understanding that language could take 10 minutes. Having that understanding as you're going through all of that of that innovation paradox that people are terrible at predicting their future behavior and they're terrible at providing accurate causal mechanisms to past behavior, knowing that you just can't ask anything leading. You can't let them give simple answers. That doesn't mean that you have to ... that you're pushing really hard. It more means that you're truly being inquisitive and making them ... help them understand themselves. Those are some of the pieces that are really hard to learn how to do and take a while. Really it's about understanding that framework and then just getting reps.

Derek: Could we go back ... you said it's really important to build trust. How do you build trust? How do you get somebody to trust you enough that they'll share emotional, social dimensions of their behavior?

Andrew Glaser: It's almost a way of talking about the conversation as if it doesn't matter that much. Meaning like, you describe it as we're just trying to learn the language. This is early research. We're trying to learn the language that people use when they're trying to purchase this product.

Bob Moesta: Let me just give you an example. What I always say is something like "We've got a really, really big research project coming up. Before we do that, I just want to get a hand full of people on the phone and hear their stories of what caused them to say today's the day to buy a new mattress. To be honest, today is just about hearing your story. There's no right or wrong answers. I don't have a list of questions. It's really about digging into your story and getting language. I'm apologizing up front. I'm going to interrupt a lot. As we interrupt, I'm literally going to say, you're going to say comfortable and I'm going to say what do you mean by that. It's all we're really trying to make sure we understand. If you don't know, you don't know. But it's literally give me the permission to just interrupt."

Derek: Even as you're sitting across this table from me, Bob, I'm feeling my fear ... if you're interviewing me about mattresses ... is that you know a lot more about mattresses than I do. So I'm going to say something stupid. I'm going to call something a coil that's really a blow dryer or whatever. But you're just saying we're brand new to this. This is all open field.

Bob Moesta: I always say "Look, I'm new to the industry as well. I'm doing this on behalf of somebody else." Or "This is my first day. To be honest, I don't know that much about it so you might ask us questions and I wont' know but I'll make sure that we follow up." The aspect here is being able to make sure that they understand it's really about learning their language and help us. To be honest, the industry has its own set of language of coils and hybrid and all this other stuff. But that's not how real people talk about mattresses. So help me see it from your side. That's where then you put the guard down and start saying like "Wait, I'm confused. You said it was a hybrid. What's a hybrid to you when you saw that?" Oh, it had this and this. It could be a completely wrong definition but that's what their perception is. Perception is reality. It's not about trying to challenge whether they're right or wrong. You have to reflect, if you will, the stupidity onto you like I'm confused. I don't know. It's all that aspect of you're inquisitive. The more you're attentive to their details, it's like the first time people appreciate that you're really listening to them. All of a sudden they're like, "Well, I didn't really mean it that way. I meant it this way." So you go back and forth. Part of it is, though, to put that vulnerability on yourself to take it away from them.

Andrew Glaser: An indicator that you're doing well is when people might say "I can't believe I'm even talking about this with you." That's when you start getting pretty good at it. They almost feel like they're in control. Think about when you're in a therapy session. The patient is really more in the control than the therapist. How do we ... so much in research it feels like the researcher is in control.

Derek: You told us a trick, Andrew, for getting that rhythm going from the very beginning of your interviews. Could you repeat that?

Andrew Glaser: Sure. I try to give ... right from the beginning ... I say, "Look, I just want to spend the first 10 minutes ... I know no one's every going to spend 10 minutes. It's never happened. It's usually ... sometimes it's 30 seconds ... Spend the first 10 minutes just telling me your story. Go as long as you want, as much detail as you can from your first thought about this product through research, through going to stores, all the way through buying. Be as detailed as you can." Sometimes it's "Well I thought about it. Then I went to the store and I left." Sometimes it's five minutes. That's when you ... now they're talking. They're opening up. They feel like they're in control and then I ask for permission to ask questions when they're done. I say, "Is that everything or do you want to keep going? Then I can ask some questions. It's up to you."

Derek: We're almost at time. I will observe something about the friendship between these two gentlemen. When they came to my office this morning, they started talking about “Jobs”. Then we went to lunch and were talking about “Jobs”. Then we came here and we've been talking about “Jobs”. Craig will hit time soon and we'll end the podcast and they'll keep talking about “Jobs”. Andrew, “Jobs” has influenced the way you see everything?

Andrew Glaser: That's right.

Derek: You talked about some interesting thought experiments that our listeners can do as they look around the world and try to speculate what's going on here. Talk about a couple of those things that you said that you see that you go, "Oh, I think “Jobs” is at work here."

Andrew Glaser: Sure. I think you're talking about how you could've predicted, say, the iPhone. Disrupting the Blackberry. Another example would be Instagram and how you could've predicted Instagram. We can start there and then work back to the iPhone. With Instagram, if I painted this picture for you of here's this company called Facebook. It has a billion users. You can post photos. You can like photos. You can comment on those photos. I'm going to start another service that has pictures that you can post, that you can like, that you can comment on. What in the world? Why is this thing going to work? How could it possibly work? In “Jobs” you look for where's the non-consumption in Facebook. Where was the non-consumption in Facebook? Where were the struggling moments? The struggling moment in Facebook was what did they not ... what did people not post on Facebook? It was pictures of food. Food is everywhere on Instagram. Why wouldn't someone post a picture of food? It's because it looks terrible without filters. Same thing with landscapes and taking pictures of the ocean. Every Instagram influencer has a picture of them near the ocean. That looked terrible, in comparison, on Facebook. The entire service was because that job was not being done. Help me appear like a professional photographer and you can create an entirely new social network that is arguably ... has much more momentum than Facebook now, off of that very simple JOB need.

Bob Moesta: So the aspect to me is to really look at it and go "Where did people want to post but they didn't?" Right? Non-consumption. But they why didn't they? You start to realize it's for all those other reasons. It's one of those things where it was on the phone. It was very quick. It was very easy but it had the filters. It enabled ... it literally was not only easier and faster but it was better and the aspect of having everybody learned most of Facebook on the desk top or laptop version. The notion is that as it got easier it was like yeah. Then Instagram just took off because of those two things.

Derek: Gentlemen, this has been a master class in the need for “Jobs” and the importance of beginning with a clean slate as you're doing your research, the importance of building trust, of practice at this technique and then looking around in the world beyond whatever you do from nine to five and look at the struggling moments that people are in and how they're trying to make progress and just really sensitizing yourself to that outside in perspective. Any other final advice for our listeners, Andrew or Bob?

Bob Moesta: I just want to comment to your thing that we think about “Jobs” all the time. I don't actually think we think about “Jobs” all the time. I think we think about progress, innovation, and how to build products. I'm more of a maker and Andrew is the same way. What can we go build to help people and these things? I think “Jobs” is one of the tools that we have and it's a way in which it helps us frame where there's opportunity and what to do. I think it's weaved through a lot of conversations but it's not like if the word “Jobs” went away I'm not worried about that. It's more about making sure we understand where do people struggle, where are those opportunities to help, where is there opportunity for progress and “Jobs” is that language we happen to use for it. It's not just “Jobs”. It's really about building stuff.

Andrew Glaser: My parting remark is pretty simple. There's some people out there that you know have a tremendous EQ. We know that EQ has been studied to be more predictive of success ... EQ and persistence ... than IQ. What “Jobs” has done for me, in a really big way, I was not one of those people that had a great EQ early. That can spot products. That can spot progress. There are people out there like a Steve “Jobs” who just seize it naturally. That was not me. I had an engineering mind set, very different than an innovation mind set. There's a big difference between an inventor and an innovator. “Jobs” gave me that ability to be systematic about that. Then once you see it that way, it is so liberating. It's like I was never able to do this thing that I saw everybody else be able to ... or not a lot of people but people be able to do ... and I can now like I can actually do it better than they can.

Derek: That's a wonderful, wonderful place to end. Gentlemen, our students are always so hungry to have examples of practitioners who actually are able to do this technique. Who can share insights with them and who can help them to just gain in their understanding of the advantage of really asking why of customers and not just what of products. We can't thank you enough for the time that you've spent with us today. We wish you all the best of luck. When Craig stops rolling the tape, we'll go back to talking about “Jobs”. So for all of you, thank you for listening to us today.

Bob Moesta: Thanks, Derek.

Andrew Glaser: Thank you.

Derek: Bye bye.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us here at the Disruptive Voice. If you like our show, and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.