Borrow Liberally

Steve Jobs was certainly a believer that “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

He and Bill Gates famously took ideas from Xerox PARC (I deliberately avoid using the word “stole” as it’s unclear what the exact arrangements and expectations of ownership in those partnerships were, but suffice it to say, there was extensive “sharing” in intellectual property at the very least).

I’ve enjoyed seeing that lineage of borrowing continue from one generation of business to the next. In the fantastic The Everything Store, we see how Jeff Bezos borrowed from Microsoft and Bill Gates in numerous cases. One of my favorite examples is Bezos borrowing Gates’ tactic of holding annual think weeks, in which he devotes a week to reading and fresh thinking, especially because it resulted in a famous organizational innovation celebrated to this day:

“After the stock market crash of 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn't want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind of employees he wanted in simple terms. All new hires had to directly improve the outcome of the company. He wanted doers — engineers, developers, perhaps merchandise buyers, but not managers…

“But as was often the case, no one could anticipate just how far Bezos would venture into these organizational theories in his quest to distill them down to their core ideas. In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. In this respect, Microsoft Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example. Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the senior leadership team in the basement of his home.

“The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called two-pizza teams. Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than 10 people – small enough of that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon's biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. Freed from the constraints of intracompany communication, Bezos hoped, these loosely coupled teams could move faster and get features to customers quicker.”

I couldn’t help but remember how Bill Bowerman’s flash of inspiration — one that set Nike apart from the pack — was fueled by a tactic he borrowed from a competitor.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.