Learning from success?

There's an interesting article in the New Scientist this week critiquing a forthcoming book for making recommendations based on analysis of a few very successful individuals. As the article points out, this approach is common in self-help books and also in business books:

Gates is not alone in believing that society can be improved by studying successful folk. Some of the best-selling non-fiction books of recent years include The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (over 15 million sold) and Built to Last: Successful habits of visionary companies (almost five years on Business Week's best-seller list). So what do these books tell us about the roots of success? From a scientific point of view, almost nothing.

Ouch. Why not? Problems include a lack of suitable controls (i.e. as well as looking at what successful people have been doing we should look at what the unsuccessful have been doing) and the rarity of huge success compared to normal performance.

In addition, business books often tend to look for very simple, monocausal, explanations. The world is rarely so simple. Even if it is, there's a limit to how successful you can be by aping others—you need to be different from competitors.

You also need to know what to copy. Contrary to the advertising, wearing the same shoes as Kevin Pietersen, or silly earrings, won't make me a great cricketer. Likewise using the same CRM software as Wal-Mart is unlikely to allow you to take over the world.

These and other failings are pointed out in an interesting book, The Halo Effect, which I'll be reviewing here early in the new year. The message is: be very careful about which aspects of top organisations you seek to emulate. They may not be as good as you think they are, and the reasons for their success may not be as simple as they seem.

Better to focus on what your customers say they want, and deliver that consistently, than to get carried away by the latest exciting idea topping the bestseller lists.