If your product features have been copied by your competitors, the road to long-lasting differentiation is to integrate around the experience.
It is rare the company that has proven itself capable of sustaining differentiation for significant periods (…). In those rare cases where competitors seem unable to copy a successful company, the barrier rarely is the product –that is the easiest to copy. Rather, if you want to put your finger on the precise spot in an organization where enduring differentiation can be built, it would be in the way the company has integrated in order to provide the experiences requires to do the job. This is what seems hard for competitors to copy.
Integrating around the Job to Be Done. HBR module note, August 11, 2010. Clayton M. Christensen
Record labels have a very strong voice when it comes to arguing for their particular business model, which is in fact out of date. The result is that laws have been created which make out as if the only problem on the internet is teenagers stealing music. The world is bigger than that. The internet is bigger than the music industry. The economic impact of the internet is bigger than the music industry.
We hear a lot about companies that are highly praised for being great places to work. It is a good thing, because being comfortable at work is an important condition for doing great work, develop yourself, and help others give their best effort.
But there are also two commonplace complains:
A lot of time is wasted on badly planned or unnecesary meetings. (Sometimes it seems that all the best practices about effective meetings are forgotten the minute a meeting starts.)
It is really difficult to get even an hour of interruption-free time at the office. If your work requires creativity or advanced problem-solving skills, interruption-free time is essential for doing great work.
Sometimes we loose sight that a great place to work is, in first place, a great place for doing work. That is, a place where you are not only doing things, but actually working, in the sense of giving your best effort and adding value.
As managers, we put special emphasis on recruiting high-potential, high-talented candidates. After hiring them, do we create the conditions so that they can work on what they do best? Or maybe we have them just doing things most of the time?
Jason Fried, founder of 37signals.com and author of Getting Real
and Rework, talks about this and other ideas around work and personal productivity on this TED video.
and 
, talks about this and other ideas around work and personal productivity on this TED video.