The dangers of copying successful leaders and companies

World War II gave Melanesian islanders front row seats to the largest war ever fought by technologically advanced nations.

The soldiers setup bases and brought tons of medicine, weapons and equipment. They shared these supplies with locals who acted as guides and hosts.

Its hard to imagine how sudden and drastically the islanders’ lifestyle changed.

Cargo stopped arriving after the war at the now abandoned airbases. Charismatic local leaders responded by developing cults. They promised people that gifts would arrive from ancestors in the form of more food, weapons and vehicles.

The key was to imitate the practices of the departed soldiers. They performed parade drills with wooden rifles and wore fake headphones sitting in fabricated control towers. They cut new landing strips in the jungle and built life-size airplanes out of straw.

But the waved landing signals and torches lit up on runways and lighthouses as signal fires did not attract more airplanes. The cult members didn’t understand the war, bases and cargo delivery from first principle.

The lesson here is that we must resist the temptation to blindly copy the practices of successful leaders and companies. Small companies often ruin their productivity by adopting the practices of large companies. Young leaders suffer when they copy famous leaders without knowing if those leaders succeeded because of or in spite of a certain behavior.

The key is not to build your leadership or company out of other people's straw. Instead we should:

• Work to understand things from first principle as much as possible; and
• Develop an understanding of cause and effect not just correlation.