Guest Thinkers — February 22, 2011

Clayton Christensen: What do customers want from your products?

At the World Innovation Forum in New York City, Harvard’s Clayton Christensen delighted the audience with his classic story of the “milkshake” (as seen at the top right of the picture) to illustrate the following question that all marketers face: What do customers really want from your products? As Christensen explains, customers “hire” products to do “jobs” for them — it is up to companies to create the right types of products to fill these jobs appropriately. Rather than segmenting by customer demographics or by product category, companies instead should consider “the job to be done.”

Photo courtesy of Dov Friedmann – PhotographybyDov.com

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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