Can We Kill Copy Culture?

By now I think everyone has heard of cancel culture, a form of boycott when an individual acts or speaks in a questionable manner. But what about copy culture? Copy culture can be far more dangerous for your business since it can give the illusion of transformation with little meaningful growth. 

Before we go there, we have to understand culture. Culture is the collective set of beliefs, attitudes and ethics inside of your business. Some of it is talked about, but most of it is not; it’s acted out as things that are obvious to do, or don’t even occur to us on a day to day basis. It’s analogous to what water is to a fish: all encompassing and everywhere, at least until you start to distinguish it. 

Copy culture is just what it sounds like, you see your competitor doing something and you copy it. Plain and simple. Copy culture is everywhere and in some ways it's beneficial for things that work. But increasingly, it’s replacing internally generated ideas and progress. At its worst, it takes more of a focus from what customers actually may need. Copy culture isn’t creating anything -- there’s little growth and it certainly isn’t transformational.

I learned from business writer Freek Vermeulen that the Aboriginals on the Micronesian island of Ponapae noticed that owning a large yam contributed to their success. Anthropologists documented a culture where others made huge efforts to simply have large yams, oftentimes sacrificing their own well-being. It became about having the large yam to copy the successful, which ironically detracted from necessary things like feeding their families. The large yams were simply an indication of a person’s skill as a farmer which led to their success. It wasn’t simply having a large yam. Surprise, surprise. 

It seems obvious in that story, but how many times do we copy the results of someone we see as successful? For example, a competitor is successful with LinkedIn ads, so we think we should run ads too, or a competitor is successfully offering a new non-meat substitute, so we think we should offer that too. Or, Amazon is great at innovation because they have so much money so unless I have that kind of money I can't be innovative (completely untrue, of course). 

We mistakenly look to others' results as what made them successful. That's reverse causality. In reality, it’s the other way around. Copying successful outcomes only may give you that same outcome, not the cause of the success in the first place.

In lieu of real innovation, copying is second place since you’re at least doing something. But doing something just because someone else is doing it doesn’t lead to meaningful growth. Playing copy culture out, it makes everything and everyone the same. When everything is the same, there’s no uniqueness and no opportunity for breakout growth. 

What’s needed is a creative culture. A courageous culture. A group of people willing to risk being wrong by standing up for what they believe is right. How do you make innovation decisions in your company? Do you make them because they’re the right thing to do? Or do you make them just because someone else already has?