The Emperor's New Xerox

Imitation has become the sincerest form of strategy.

Companies insist on their uniqueness, yet copy one another with the fidelity of a copy of a copy of a copy. A new operating model surfaces somewhere, and within months it has been photocopied throughout the industry, each round losing a fraction of contrast, until the surviving image is no longer recognizable as the original it claims to descend from. What started as a deliberate choice becomes a smudge, and the smudge is what everyone now copies. This is known as mimetic isomorphism, the tendency of organizations to imitate peers they perceive as successful whenever no one is quite sure what success requires. The most visible examples are the ones everyone is copying right now: the tech giant’s return-to-office mandates and AI initiatives.

All of this happens at the precise moment an organization decides that candour costs more than compliance. A manager once told me that not every hill is worth dying on. Stop running up hills and you stop fighting altogether, and after a while the terrain becomes flat. Without a vantage point to understand the landscape, you follow whomever you think is leading, so you end up with a conga line where each organization copies the one before, badly, and no one knows where it is going.

That conga line of copiers is what Chris Argyris calls single-loop learning, in which all assumptions are taken as given. The surface is copied without the constraints that produced it, and the copy persists because no one in the back of the line has a clue about those constraints. Double-loop learning interrogates the assumptions themselves, which would make organizations question why they are in the line at all, but that threatens the identity that the organization’s success was built on.

In ordinary life, people stand in front of the bathroom mirror and say, “I look like a wreck.” They do not blame the mirror, for it merely revealed what had accumulated while they were distracted or in denial about themselves. Organizations view anyone who holds up a mirror as a threat, because the mirror reveals the conga line: everyone is copying the one before, with no destination in sight. The Xerox keeps copying as long as no one asks where it is headed or why. Anyone who dares ask is out of line.