Strategies for a copy-paste economy

Being originally from a next-to-perfection Nordic society like Finland, strictly governed by rules and regulations, and arriving to a completely different less-structured environment like Sri Lanka one quickly notices what’s wrong.

When I was walking in the Galle Fort and spotted a Pizza Hut logo I thought it was an unusually nice place to put up a franchise. Further observation revealed the words “pizza” & “hot”. Soon I realized it wasn’t the world-renowned franchise at all, but a small restaurant who was riding on someone else’s fame.

A shopping tour in Bambalapitiya had shown me a multitude of hard-working self-employed entrepreneurs who were running a thriving business… with stolen products! Gazillion small shops were opening their doors for me to buy the latest CDs and DVDs at a very affordable price. Not a single rupee of their turnover would go in the pockets of the artists who made them.

On Cotta Road I noticed the pride of my home country, Nokia, being nicely re-branded in black and red colours.

I soon realized that even some companies are being open about using pirated software, some of them thinking that it would be foolish to mount the cost-structures with licensing so and so many copies of the same Microsoft bundle of products.

The icing on the cake was when I saw my friend’s passport picture in the advert of a photo-store, a picture she had taken in that very same store a couple of weeks back. Guess if she was ever asked permission for that?

These early experiences in the land like no other made me name Sri Lanka as “a copy-paste economy”.

But spending 1.5 years in a country makes you question if certain things really are wrong. Rather, you start examining what we can learn about it.

At the turn of the millennium we started noticing the exponentially increasing quantity of data: from 1999 to 2003 alone the amount of data produced in the world grew by 70% annually! So, is the rest of the world really so different after all? If I copy file am I producing data? If I write this article am I just copying, restructuring and pasting others ideas?

Even if you look at businesses world-wide the companies within any given industry are slowly but surely starting to resemble each other. There is a tendency of observing competitors and making sure they are not creating competitive advantage using something that we don’t offer. Soon, every single company within the industry looks the same, tastes the same, feels the same and offers the same products!

We are time-travelling
My claim is that societies we live in are encouraging copy-pasting. Take for example the conundrum between public opinion that is touting the importance of innovation through entrepreneurship and the legal procedure of registering a new company. The start-up has to define the industry they will operate in, i.e. choose from the existing variety. Aren’t they more likely to re-create what someone has done already? Is that real entrepreneurship? How do people who have come up with an original idea that just doesn’t fit the current tray of choice feel?

Human beings always try to make sense of things, categorize and explain. We want to find quick fixes. We're jumping into solutions. Instead of trying to ask the right questions we aim to give the right answers without hesitation. Though it might save time, it's limiting our thinking, keeping away the breakthrough ideas that could potentially change the world for the better, or at least improve our bottom line.

When I say human being, I don’t mean we are like that by nature. Imagine you were a five year old rascal asking questions all the time, trying, failing, adapting and asking again: "why didn't it work?" As we enter the school system our natural questioning gets suffocated when there are suddenly so many “right” answers. By the time we reach university we are merely trained to pass the exams, not to learn for life, not to question. If this downward trend is so visible from the childhood to graduation, what happens when we enter the working life? What happens after years of experience? What happens when you become a leader?

So, by nature we are curious, we want to learn, we want to improve, we need change for better. But the society with its accepted norms and structures is always lagging behind.

Think about the emergence of the fourth sector. Have you heard about it? Maybe not… But it’s there! Traditionally we've had three sectors of society – public (government), private (companies) and social (non-profit) sectors.

Companies whose aim was to make social change happen formed the fourth sector and are now called social enterprises. Recently even big companies from the private sector are sliding into the fourth sector. I’m not talking about outdated Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives where you get your staff to play a cricket match for charity or collect clothes and books for an orphanage. I’m talking about giants like GE or Marks & Spencer completely transforming their business to have major positive change in society.

Simultaneously more and more non-profits are becoming not-for-profit by nature, meaning it is ok to make money as long as it’s channeled back to serving the organization’s purpose.

Or imagine those b-class flicks where a guy travels to the future and is utterly confused about what’s going on. Guess what? We’ve all done that time travel! Visualize a manager still living in, say, the 80s coming to lead a contemporary software company. There he is looking at our people happily giving out our product, not to mention thousands of employees who work for us without salary. That would sound ridiculous for him! We call it open-source and for us it’s an accepted money-making logic.

What’s the difference of open-source and copy-paste after all? Is it just that open-source is legal and copy-paste might not be? Or is it that copy-paste is effortless but open-source requires years of sweating?

Outsourcing your brain
As a company which is dealing with strategy it continues to amaze us how the prevalent thinking still is that you can outsource your strategy making. For us it sounds like another quick fix mentioned before, paying for a conclusion you can jump into, an easy way out. We have thousands and tens of thousands of competitors world-wide who are happy to accept a client project where they make the strategy for the client, bind it nicely and hand it over expecting them to run their business with it.

No wonder books like “Making Strategy Work” (Hrebiniak) and “Execution” (Charan) are becoming best-sellers. The top-management teams who receive their strategy bound nicely have no idea what to do with it. In companies like this there are no clear-cut roles that would ensure accountability for making it happen. There is no deep understanding or strategic thinking in people’s minds that should make it happen. There is no ownership, no drive, and no lust to make it happen. So, how can it happen?

The dilemma of outsourcing your brain is that unintentionally you let go of your heart also.

Agreed, as managers we don’t have much time to waste, we’re under pressure and we have to show results. But if we continue finding quick fixes and we order a copy-paste solution, thus outsourcing our brain, we end up with crap (excuse my French).
Hello! You need to go through the pain! You need someone to push you till it hurts to ensure that full use of your brain and heart has been put into action. Once you’ve gone through the pain in making the strategy, you avoid so much pain in the execution.

Re-create the wheel
Admittedly copy-paste works to a certain extent. In most of the cases re-creating the wheel is waste of time and money. But have you really gone to the bottom of the problem? Have you really dug deep to see if the wheel is even needed or should the solution be more cubical in nature?

Whether your aim is to fight the climate change, enter new markets, bulge the bottom line or just simply make your factory or office a kick-ass place to work, do not fall for quick fixes. Get your people to be part of creating the strategy, challenge them, and take them out of their limited scope of thinking for a while. Copy-paste is here to stay but use it wisely.

Even this article is essentially not written by me. Though my brain generated the content and my fingers typed it down, these are largely not my ideas. Not only is there years of studying and learning from the experience of others but also during the writing process I got inspired by others' thoughts.

If I had not srilankanized my thinking so much I would let you in on details of which articles, books, web-sites and videos have inspired my thinking. I would provide you with more sources and an extensive list of further reading. But as a proud member of our copy-paste community I just need to say: Google it up!

(The writer is a facilitator working with Unleash Talent INC, a unique leadership and strategy development organization (www.unleashtalent.com). He holds a Master’s degree in Economics and Business Administration, specializing in Organizations and Management. He’s been exposed to Sri Lankan business life since August 2006).