We often see that many early stage companies tend to borrow the wisdom and knowledge and sometimes even their standards from the competition, the market, or from the customers. They see it as an inspiration but when their approach is based on a sort of templatization of *making a product* or *building a business*—it lacks the foundational adaptability for their specific business scenarios.
This mindset leaves them unprepared or undercooked when they need to respond to certain situations such as for new product stories, a change in pricing, a chance in business model, responding to a new competing player, and so on.
By the time, they develop their own internal wisdom, they lack the counter-intelligence (CI and not AI) to stay aware of the possible consequences.
For example when I think of why people loved so much Slack in its early days, it was not only the product utility or usefullness—the differentiator was in their attention to detail in the onboarding and in the customer-centric interactions in the product. When Airtable was growing fast, so many teams announced a *spreadsheets on steroids* on the borrowed ideas and user cases and but most of them have failed. This is because they did not have their own principles and standards, and the counter-intelligence. We saw it for many competitors of Airbnb and of Notion in their respective categories.
Last month, Dan Mall ran a LinkedIn poll asking—Does Apple have an uncopyable business? Why or why not?”
I responded as Yes, Apple is uncopyable, because their business includes their standards as well. Since I anticipated that most of the participants would be design leaders (assuming it for Dan’t network), I kept it concise.
This is specifically true for Apple and I think it is true for many organizations. Culture is about the sensibilities that an organization builds with time, on certain principles. The atomic unit of such a culture are their people—the individuals, and their interactions. No organization can copy these atomic units. It is not about Apple.
Dan asked me to explain it further and this is what I replied.
“To me culture is everything that makes them work—the onboarding of employees, the introduction to the brand, the product/design/message principles, their decision models, their subjective judgement in the product and design work that they build slowly, and adding strength to that judgment by applying those learnings.”
“Isn’t it unique? Isn’t it very specific and unique—what makes us human, individually and collectively?”
“If another company, say Pineapple wants to copy Apple’s culture—they cannot. They can borrow some ideas and inspiration, they can copy the frameworks, models, and systems, but they cannot copy the *Culture* in the holistic sense.”
“Culture is not a template. Nor a car. Nor even a city.”
Here is Dan’s poll and the discussions if you are curious to see.
Apple is uncopyable.
Organizations should not try to copy a product, they cannot. Culture is an undistinguished part of the product—Netflix is Netflix because of the its people and the culture and not only because of the product, as Tomasz Tunguz talks about it here in this post.
PS: The biggest fallacy in business is to try to separate it from the culture.
