Steal, Don't Copy

Steve Jobs quotes Picasso here, but he had it slightly wrong. Jobs was actually borrowing from the poet T.S. Eliot, who said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But we get the point.

Jobs understood the difference between copying and stealing leadership methods. When people watch great leaders perform, their first reaction is often to imitate behaviors they observe. It’s natural because what works for one should work for another. Yet, they often don’t really understand the difference between stealing and copying.

Copying, for example, occurs when a coach examines another team's plays and decides to implement one specific play only because it was successful. Former San Francisco 49ers Coach Bill Walsh despised this. He felt like taking a play without understanding its origins was weak, lazy and would ultimately cause more harm than good. He often asked, “How can we copy a play if we don’t know how to fix the play when it breaks down?” Walsh was thinking differently — much like many in the far East.

In Japanese culture, this is called “Shu-Ha-Ri.” It is a three-stage procedure that allows the learner to completely grasp the process — progressing from copying to essentially stealing. People who are learning and mastering new skills pass through three rather different stages of behavior: following, detaching and fluent.

Following

Those in the following stage look for one procedure that works. Even if 10 procedures could do the job, they can’t learn 10 at once, so they find one that works. They copy it; they learn it.

Detaching

In the detaching stage, the student learns to adapt the procedure to varying circumstances, becoming more interested in learning the 10 alternative procedures and understanding all of them.

Fluent

In the third, fluent stage, it becomes irrelevant to the practitioner whether he/she is following any particular technique or not. Their knowledge has become integrated throughout a thousand thoughts and actions. When asked if he/she is following a particular procedure, the student would likely shrug his/her shoulders. It doesn’t matter to them whether they’re following a procedure, improvising around one or making up a new one. They have complete knowledge and understand the desired end effect and simply make their way to it.

When young leaders watch a great leader, they often want to copy their methods. But unless they grow through the three stages of learning, they will likely fail because they will have severely limited themselves. Stealing takes more time and patience and, most of all, a willingness to find alternative ways.

Let’s be stealers, not copiers.