When Phil Jackson won eleven NBA championships using the triangle offense, thousands of basketball coaches rushed to install it and failed.
When Jack Welch transformed General Electric with forced ranking and “rank and yank” performance reviews, HR departments worldwide adopted the practice wholesale. And then watched morale collapse and their best people leave.
When Jim Collins published Good to Great and identified the habits of high-performing companies, executives everywhere tried to replicate those exact habits — usually without the disciplined cultures that made those habits work in the first place.
The pattern is familiar, and the seduction is understandable. People become enchanted with the idea that someone else’s magic can work for them.
A leader achieves extraordinary results, writes a book, explains how they did it, and audiences attempt to replicate it. Unfortunately, those efforts almost always fail to reproduce the same outcome. In many cases, the imitators end up worse off than when they started.
That’s because the solutions designed for others were built to address a specific problem, in a specific place, and at a specific time.
Solutions, even grand ones, rarely travel well. They are context-specific and produce great outcomes because of the unique mix of ingredients present at that moment.
The triangle offense worked well for Jackson because he had Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, players of rare basketball intelligence who could improvise within the structure and share decisions on the fly to keep defenders off-balance.
Give the same system to a roster without that instinct, and it doesn’t underperform. It collapses.
There are many lessons to learn from successful approaches, but importing the solution directly is not one of them. What skilled leaders actually do when they study other leaders and organizations is to mine for transferable logic, not transferable solutions.
The better move is to examine the underlying principles that guided those solutions, then build something that fits your organization’s specific people, culture, and competitive moment.
When Atul Gawande studied aviation checklists and applied the idea to surgery, he did not import them into the operating room.
He asked what principle made them work and then built a new tool for a new context — the surgical checklist. The result was one of the most consequential patient safety interventions in modern medicine.
Good leaders resist the comfort of mimicry and do the harder work of translation.
Leaders who learn the most from studying others treat every success story as a puzzle to reverse engineer, not a photocopy to reproduce.
They don’t ask, “What did they do?” Instead, they ask, “Why did it work there?” They then bring that understanding to their own problems and opportunities.
Stealing someone else’s solution underestimates the unique circumstances that made it work. Borrowing the principle underneath it is where the real learning begins. That’s the move worth making.
