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Due to technological change, leaders and the organizations they run have no choice but to embrace perpetual transformation. In this environment, evolving the business model is an ongoing process that demands close attention to the customer and their 'jobs to be done'. Traditionally, start-ups have focused on this via Lean Start-up Methodology; but today, every organization must adopt this focus. The author, a Silicon Valley veteran, describes a new framework-the Jobs-to-be-Done Market Definition Canvas, which makes needs discovery faster-and reliably leads to market success.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists used to routinely oust start-up founders--who were viewed as green and unskilled--as part of the process leading to an IPO. The author, an adjunct professor at Stanford and a well-known entrepreneurship thinker, describes how VCs gradually came to see founders not as a problem that needed to be solved but as a valuable asset that needed to be retained. In July 2009, when Mark Andreessen cofounded the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz, it was with a key philosophical difference from rival firms: a "founder friendly" focus. Blank argues that this trend has gone too far, and the situation at Uber is just the most obvious example of that. He offers prescriptions for how to begin correcting this power imbalance.