New View EDU Episode 57: Jobs to Be Done in Schools

Available April 23, 2024

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What’s the difference between the job to be done by a Milky Way bar and the job to be done by a Snickers bar? And what does that have to do with schools? As it turns out, a lot, according to Bob Moesta. The author, professor, innovator, and founder of The Re-Wired Group joins New View EDU to outline how reframing our thinking about the jobs to be done by our schools can transform the way we approach hiring, retention, admissions, and student engagement.

Bob MoestaBob sits down with host Tim Fish for a candid conversation about his journey from a struggling student with dyslexia, to an entrepreneur and innovator whose work helped contribute to the famous Betty White Snickers ad campaign. Bob shares that in his view, dyslexia was a gift that helped him unlock his superpowers—if he couldn’t fit into the traditional educational system, he would have to learn to harness his divergent thinking to do something new and different. Bob encourages parents and teachers not to try to “fix” kids with learning disabilities, at the risk of dulling their strengths.

One of the strengths Bob says he has cultivated through his life experiences is empathy, and through that empathy, he developed a keen ability to tap into the emotional experience inherent in every customer journey—including the relationship of a family to a school. Starting from the premise that we choose products and experiences for their emotional value to our lives, Bob maintains that in the world of independent schools, we often think about that value all wrong. While schools may say they’re offering perks like small class sizes or state-of-the-art facilities, and parents may list those as reasons they’ve chosen the school for their kids, Bob says the real motivators are very different.

Rather than look at what families appear to appreciate or not appreciate about a school setting, Bob urges us to ask about the conditions that were present when the family chose the school. Looking at what’s behind any consumer decision or major life change, Bob says, is the essence of the actual story to be told. Just as he worked with the makers of Snickers bars to uncover the reality that people tend to reach for a Snickers bar as an energy replacement, versus choosing a Milky Way bar as a sweet treat, Bob works with families to discover the reality behind their educational choices. Was their child struggling in their previous school setting? Was the social situation or the curriculum unsuited to the child’s needs? What was the catalyst that drove the family to seek out the school they ultimately chose?

Understanding the underlying reasons for school choice involves also understanding Bob’s theory of pushes and pulls: the forces that actually drive consumer decisions and factor heavily into enrollment at independent schools. The push, he says, is the context around the moment of struggle that causes people to seek a change. The pull is the outcome people seek from that change. What’s absent from the reality of pushes and pulls, he points out, is all of the trappings schools tend to focus on: newer facilities, beautiful campuses, small class sizes, and so on. None of that matters, Bob says, unless a family can see how those assets will contribute to the outcome they’re seeking for their child. 

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Tim and Bob explore in this episode include:

  • How do we uncover the Jobs to Be Done by our schools, and how do those jobs relate to the individual journeys of families who are considering enrollment?
  • What is the difference between a “push” and a “pull?” How do these ideas determine the path of a family seeking an independent school?
  • How would an admission team ideally communicate with a prospective family to maximize understanding of the pushes and pulls and help relieve that family’s anxieties?
  • What about employment and retention? How does understanding the context around pushes and pulls change the way we might think about crafting and supporting roles within a workplace?

Episode Highlights

  • “What we don't realize is people have natural abilities that they're really, really good at, and they actually have things they aren’t good at. And nine times out of 10, they tell people, oh, you’ve got to get better at this thing because you aren’t good at it. But when you make somebody better at creativity, you actually ruin them for the structure, which they're really good at. They're actually interdependent.” (8:21)
  • “Nobody randomly shows up at a school and says, oh yeah, I want to join. I want to be part of your school. There's a set of causes behind it. But what happens is we ask them at a very pablum level, a very, oh, it's because of the facilities you have, your facilities are great. Or, oh my gosh, the teachers are so pedigreed. It's like, but that's not why they're doing it. They're doing it because their child is falling behind. They're doing it because their child is literally not ready for the next level. They're doing it because they want their kids to have broader experiences. And so you start to realize, it's about their child and their relationship with their child that they're actually buying your school for.” (13:55)
  • “The thing is, we can't predict the future without actually understanding the past. And so what happens is, we're literally asking them questions like, so what would you like in a new school? And it's like, they're just making it up. They don't know. And so part of this is why we talk, we start by talking to parents who already came, because they had to have the push, they had to have the pull, they had the anxieties, they made the tradeoffs. Now I have a frame to understand, because for every one parent who made it, there's 10, 100, 1,000 behind them who want to make it, but haven't figured it out.” (34:33)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guest

Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker, and professor. He is the president and founder of The Re-Wired Group, as well as an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He is the author of Choosing College (with Michael Horn), Demand-Side Sales 101, and Learning to Build—5 Bedrock Skills of Innovators and Entrepreneurs. He lives outside of Detroit, Michigan.