Monkey See Monkey Do
Most people know that if something has happened in the past, repeating the same steps again in a different environment, will not produce the same results.
Then why do most companies try to imitate other successfully company? They expect that doing what other successful companies did, will also make them successful.
If my company builds a search engine like Google, we’ll also be successful is bullshit. For 2 reasons. Google was not successful just because of its search engine, it was their business model around traffic monotization that made them a lot of money. Secondly there are enormous other factors that play in this context. Things like timing, market condition, skilled resources, vision, etc also play an important role.
For a sec if we assume that we can reproduce all these things, can we then be as successful as Google? My take is No. The rationale behind my answer comes from understanding that we live in a complex adaptive system. Which means the system adapts over time. So if we give the same input the system will not necessarily produce the same results. By now the system has adapted itself.
Sure there are important lessons and ideas to be learnt from others. IMHO, just following what they did will not take a company anywhere. In some cases it will do more harm than good.
A good example of this phenomena is, software companies trying to imitate Toyota production system and its lean manufacturing process. Toyota production system is out in the public domain for at least over a decade now. Forget software companies, why don’t we have another car company as successful as Toyota?
Simply because imitating some other company does not make you them.
Another exmaple comes from the Agile community. A lot of companies are trying to imitate the standard Scrum process or are trying to do XP by book. Unfortunately in-spite of doing everything as defined by the book, they are not seeing the desirable results. The problem is companies fail to understand that its the company, its people, its policies, its attitude, its culture, its market, etc that has a huge influence on the desired results not the process alone.
I’m just tried of companies who want to do a 1 or 2 day course on XP or Scrum and become successful.
