Imitation of what works well is a large step on the road to success. So to hell with innovation

LAST WEEK I boarded an evening train carrying commuters home to Winchester and beyond.

As we made our way southwest of London, two urges took hold of me and distracted me from my book. The first was to stick my Biro into the bulging flesh of the man in the seat in front, who had gone to sleep and was snoring in an irregular series of shuddering, guttural snorts and wheezes. The second was for a gin and tonic and a bag of Quavers.

I acted on neither impulse. Instead I forced myself to attend to the book, I'll Have what She's Having: Mapping Social Behaviour, written by three academics who argue that almost all our decisions are based on copying.

As I read this, it occurred to me that I’d just lent support to the thesis by unconsciously copying the other passengers in the carriage. The reason I hadn’t stabbed the snoring man with a Biro was that no one else was showing signs of wanting to do the same. And the reason I hadn’t made a dash for the buffet car was that none of the others seemed in any need of alcohol, fat and salt. So I sat tight and did nothing, not so much in the described spirit of I’ll-have-what-she’s-having as I-won’t-have-what-they’re-not-having.

The book argues that as life gets more complicated, with more people and more choices, everyone does more copying.

Now that I think of it, everything I do is copied. Columnists are meant to have original ideas, but I never do. The idea for this column – on copying – has been copied from this book, and its authors copied their ideas from assorted academics and social scientists. When I write a column, I take an existing idea and give it a tweak of my own. It’s roughly like buying a hat in the high street, and wearing it at a jaunty angle.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in this. It is good to copy – we would have died out as a race if we didn’t do it. Copying gives me access to an infinitely richer and more varied menu of ideas than if I had to limit myself to my own meagre store.

Thanks to copying, my behaviour is better too – as the Biro story shows. Copied ideas tend to be the successful ones: the hat is a better and more practical choice of headgear than something more original, like a juicy steak, say, or a chair.

Companies that copy do very well. Microsoft has built up a business worth $200 billion or so on the basis of it. Even Apple, which is always held up as an example of a company that does things its own way, built some of its most important technology after Steve Jobs first saw it at Xerox.

Copying is what office life is all about. It is the reason the virtual office, so much trumpeted, will never really take off. If people work at home, there is no one to copy.

Equally, it’s vital for leaders. I used to have a boss who would come back from lunch having copied the views of whichever important person he’d just met. At the time I thought this was a weakness and wondered why he didn’t have any views of his own. I now see it is as a strength. By constantly copying, he was keeping fresh and flexible.

Despite its undisputed value, copying has a shockingly poor image. The word makes one think of the dodgy end of the practice: cheating in exams and plagiarising – though the latter just might be undergoing a minor rehabilitation. When Anna Chapman, the Russian spy, was accused last week of passing off the work of a Kremlin spin doctor as her own, she was unrepentant. “Plagiarism is so last century,” she said.

While disparaging copying, we idolise creativity and innovation. On Amazon, there are 2,732 management books with the word “innovation” in the title. Every business school teaches courses in it. Every company frets over how to be better at generating ideas. Yet there are only a handful of titles containing the word “imitation” or “copying” – and they turn out to be manuals telling you how to operate a photocopier.

No one, it seems, is interested in teaching us how to get better at copying, which is a pretty big oversight when this, more than anything, is the difference between success and failure.

As we are ashamed of copying, we give it fancy names like “best practice” and “benchmarking”. But I’m not fooled. Copying is much bigger than benchmarking, and even harder to do well.

I hope you think that this column is an example of reasonably good copying. By contrast, I’m now coming to think that abstaining from that G and T was rotten copying. It would have lifted my spirits and injected a bit more cash into the sagging economy. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)