A Story of Milkshake

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          Once upon a time, a restaurant was trying improve the sale of milk shake. So, it hired a marketing team to find the demographic, and even made a questionnaire to ask the customers how to make better milkshake. Unfortunately, after all the effort, the sale didn’t improve.
          Another group of researchers used another approach. They asked themselves ‘what job does milkshake help people to get done’. They asked questions like what time did they come?, what clothes did they wear?, did they come alone?, did they buy other food with it?, and did they eat in? These questions lead them to interesting insights.

          Most morning buyers are commuters who have a long drive and need to get through mid-morning hunger. The main job of milkshake is not to taste good, but to help making the commuting less boring. 

         On the other hand, afternoon customers are fathers and sons. These father usually deny their son for all other stuff they need like buying toys. When they come into this restaurant, the father order food and the kids ask their father for milkshake.  Again, the job of the milkshake is not to taste good but to help a dad seem like a good dad. 

          Understanding this, the restaurant made their milkshake thicker and bigger for morning so that it will last through a commute. They also made smaller size milkshake for kids accompanying their father in the afternoon. Sales improved afterward, and the restaurant became happy ever after.

“There is no one right answer for all circumstances. You have to start by understanding the job the customer is trying to have done.” 

Source: How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

   About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.