ture discouraging all ideas that are NIH (not invented here).
Somehow, ideas are seen as no good unless you thought of them
first, a wholly brain-disregarding approach to learning!
In today’s business environment, it is clearly commercial
folly not to be continually on the lookout for good ideas. When
these are found, they will often be imitated and copied.
Indeed, this is how your mind works. From your earliest days,
when you were trying to copy the words you heard at home and
then use them yourself, your brain has always been seeking to copy
and imitate what it sees and hears. Then, as you grow up, you say
things like “Show me how to do it, please,” to ensure that you are
given the chance to imitate a friend or family member, and, later
on, a colleague at work.
It is important to make widespread use of this important
facility of the brain’s interest in imitation. This is a core tool of the
Knowledge Age, where intellectual capital is the most important
aspect of many organizations’ value. Paradoxically, now that ideas
have become the currency of success, it is even more important that
we copy and learn from other people’s. Whereas the theft of a thing
leaves an obvious debt, the imitation of an idea simply breeds more
ideas and leaves the original intact.
To be successful, you need consciously to seek to put yourself
in as many situations as possible where you are likely to be able to
imitate the best role models. This requires you to believe in the
importance of this technique as a means of learning new things, rec-
ognize the social skills needed to enable you to copy others, and be
prepared to move around to make it happen as a regular part of
your learning life.
When Arie De Geus was launching Learning at Work Day for
the Campaign for Learning at the headquarters of the British road-
side assistance company the AA, he told a story, also related in his
book The Living Company, which vividly illustrates the factors nec-
essary for the skill of imitation to be effective in practice. At the
start of the nineteenth century, milk was delivered to British homes
in bottles without tops. Two of the country’s best-loved songbirds,
the robin and the blue tit, both rapidly learned how to drink the
cream that gathered at the top of the bottle. In the 1930s, however,Resourcefulness 109