One of the first rules taught in the business world is that it is not always wise to reinvent the wheel. If another company has already found a more effective way to sell, measure performance, serve customers or build teams, there is no reason to ignore it in the name of originality. On the contrary, benchmarking is a standard management tool: Learn from the best, understand what makes them successful and examine what can be adopted.
There is sound economic logic behind this. Adopting a model that has already proved itself reduces uncertainty and the cost of experimentation. Managers and investors often prefer a product or process that resembles something that has succeeded before because it is easier to assess the risk and potential for success. But imitation becomes dangerous the moment an organization stops copying only the method and begins copying the goal as well.
Business insights from the weekly Torah portion
(Credit: Ziv Elul)
That question arises in this week's Torah portion Shoftim, which deals, among other things, with the appointment of a king. The Torah describes a situation in which the people say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations around me.” The wording is unsettling: Is the Jewish people supposed to build its systems of leadership by imitating the nations around it?
Rabbi Isaac Arama, author of “Akeidat Yitzhak,” offers a surprising answer. He sees nothing wrong with learning from other nations in matters where human experience has produced a useful system. If societies have learned that a state needs centralized leadership, a division of authority and a mechanism that directs its different parts toward the common good, there is no reason to reject that insight simply because others discovered it first.
There is a clear-eyed management principle here: Wisdom does not lose its value because someone else discovered it first. An organization that refuses to learn from competitors in the name of being “unique” may find that its uniqueness is simply a very expensive way of learning what others already know.
Arama describes the role of a king through the image of a system whose individual parts each operate in their own domain but still require someone who sees the whole picture. The organs of a body, members of a household or residents of a city cannot be satisfied merely with each doing their own job well. Someone must direct their different actions toward the common good so that the parts “help one another and do not harm one another.”
It is hard to think of a better definition of management.
Every company has professional executives with different and sometimes conflicting goals. Sales wants rapid growth, finance wants to reduce risk, development demands time and resources and human resources wants to protect employees and organizational culture. Each may be right from their own perspective, yet the company as a whole may still make the wrong decision.
Efficiency itself cannot be the ultimate purpose. After learning how others operate, we still bear responsibility for deciding why we operate.
A manager’s role is not to do the work of every department, nor is it always to side with the strongest one. The job is to connect the partial goals and ask what serves the system as a whole.
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Here Arama’s argument also connects with an idea Aristotle presents at the opening of the “Nicomachean Ethics”: Every action and choice aims at some good, but some goals are merely means toward a higher end. It is not enough to know how to perform an action well. One must also ask what it is for.
That is precisely the boundary Arama draws around imitation. We can learn from others how to build an efficient system, measure employees, manage inventory, run a customer loyalty program or use artificial intelligence. But efficiency itself cannot be the ultimate purpose. After learning how others operate, we still bear responsibility for deciding why we operate.
Many organizations miss this distinction. A competitor creates an innovation department, so they create one too. A leading company changes its organizational structure, so others copy it. Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, so an “AI strategy” quickly appears in every management presentation. None of this is necessarily wrong. Sometimes the market really has learned something new. The problem begins when “everyone is doing it” becomes a sufficient explanation.
Imitation asks: What are they doing, and how can we do the same?
Learning asks: Why does it work for them, and how can we use that principle to strengthen our own distinctive advantage?
The difference is significant. A company can copy a product and still remain behind because that product emerged from a different combination of customers, assets and capabilities. By contrast, a company that understands the principle behind a competitor’s success can take it somewhere new.
The same applies to a manager who moves from one organization to another and tries to bring along everything that worked in the previous one: the meeting structure, measurement system, culture and even the people. Some of those things may work. Others will fail, not because they were wrong, but because they were created in a different context. Leadership is not copy and paste. It is the ability to distinguish between a principle and the particular form it took.
Rabbi Isaac Arama goes one step further. In his view, the problem with the request for a king is not the desire to establish a system of government resembling those of other nations. That is the “first perfection” — the basic infrastructure required for a properly functioning society. But another level must be built on top of it: a moral and spiritual one that defines the purpose for which all that power is exercised.
Organizations also need these two levels. The first is professionalism: a good product, efficient processes, metrics, technology and operational discipline. In all of these, it makes sense to learn from the best.
But the second level cannot be copied. It answers the questions: What kind of company do we want to be? What will we refuse to do even if it is accepted practice in the industry? What unique value do we bring customers? What kind of people do we want to develop within the organization?
If everything we do is a “best practice,” we may be managing well — but someone else is still defining for us what “best” means.
The managerial test therefore begins immediately after the learning: Did we adopt the tool, or did we unknowingly adopt someone else’s definition of success as well? A good manager is not afraid to say, “We learned this from others.” There is humility and maturity in that. But that manager must also be able to say, “And this is why we will do it differently here.”
Because uniqueness is not created by refusing to be like everyone else. It is created when we know where it makes sense to be like everyone else — and why we must be more than that.
Manager’s tool: The three-question test
Before adopting an outside model, ask three questions: What principle lies behind it? Does it fit our customers, people and capabilities? And what goal of ours is it meant to serve? If there is no clear answer to the third question, it is probably not learning but imitation.
The rule is simple: Learn from the outside, adapt from within and define the purpose for ourselves.