When pressure rises, leaders look sideways. A competitor simplifies an offer, tightens pricing, or adopts a new tool—and suddenly it feels irresponsible not to follow. After all, they’ve already tested it. The market seems to respond. What’s the harm in borrowing what works?
W. Edwards Deming warned that this instinct is more dangerous than it looks. Copying competitors feels like learning, but it isn’t. It replaces understanding with imitation—and over time, it quietly erodes the capabilities that create lasting advantage.
Looking sideways feels sensible
Competitive awareness is often praised as strategic discipline. Leaders are taught to benchmark, compare, and react. When growth slows or margins tighten, this behavior intensifies. Decisions increasingly begin with familiar questions: What are they offering? How are they pricing? What tools are they using?
Deming didn’t argue that leaders should ignore the outside world. He argued something more subtle—and more demanding: examples without theory don’t teach improvement. When you copy a result without understanding the system that produced it, you’re not learning. You’re guessing.
The temptation to guess is strongest when results are hard to observe directly. Success is shaped by hidden conditions: workflow design, skills, decision rights, feedback loops, and constraints. Those don’t appear in a competitor’s marketing or pricing sheet. What does appear are surface features—offers, promises, and positioning—and those are the easiest things to imitate.
A familiar story
Alex ran a mid-sized professional services firm with smart people, loyal clients, and a solid reputation. For years, growth had been steady. Then sales began to slow. Deals dragged. Clients hesitated.
At the same time, a competitor started winning work with a clean, packaged offering. Fixed scope. Fixed price. Confident messaging. Prospects mentioned it repeatedly.
“Everyone keeps bringing them up,” Alex said in a leadership meeting. “Clients say, ‘They make it simpler.’ We’re losing deals we used to win.”
The pressure to respond was immediate.
“They’re just repackaging what everyone else does,” Morgan replied. “We could roll this out in a month.”
“If clients want simple, let’s give them simple,” Alex agreed. “Same structure. Same price points. We can’t afford to look complicated.”
The firm moved fast—new packages, new website copy, new proposal templates. From the outside, they looked competitive again.
Inside, things unraveled.
“Delivery’s struggling,” Morgan said a few weeks later. “The teams keep escalating scope questions. The package assumes things we don’t actually control.”
“But that’s how they sell it,” Alex replied, gesturing toward the competitor’s brochure on the table.
“Yes—but we don’t know how they deliver it.”
Deming warned about this exact trap: copying the visible example while ignoring the invisible system. The firm had copied the promise, not the capability. The packaging assumed standardized work, predictable inputs, and stable handoffs—none of which the firm had invested in.
Projects began running over. Staff felt squeezed between rigid promises and messy reality. Clients noticed the growing gap between what was sold and what actually showed up.
“We fixed the sales problem,” Alex finally admitted, “and created a delivery problem.”
That pause mattered. Instead of doubling down—tightening enforcement, blaming teams, or discounting harder—Alex asked a different question: What theory are we operating under? What did they believe actually created value for clients? And what system was required to deliver that value reliably?
The firm began studying its own work. Where projects slowed. Where rework came from. Which clients benefited most, and why. They ran small tests before changing external promises—clarifying scope boundaries, simplifying internal handoffs, and making client responsibilities explicit.
“The competitor’s package wasn’t wrong,” Morgan observed. “It just wasn’t ours.”
Over time, the firm rebuilt its offering around outcomes it could actually deliver. Sales stabilized—not because the firm looked like everyone else, but because its promises finally matched its system.
Where leaders go wrong
Most leaders don’t copy competitors out of laziness. They do it out of urgency. Comparison feels like action. It provides cover. If everyone is moving in the same direction, the risk feels shared and defensible.
The trouble is that copying shifts attention away from the system that produces results. It encourages leaders to manage appearances instead of capability. Organizations become skilled at changing what they say—new offers, new pricing, new tools—while leaving how work actually gets done largely untouched.
Deming captured this dynamic with a sharp observation: “What would some people do without their competitors?” When competitors become the primary reference point, learning stalls. Decisions become reactive. Improvement turns into imitation rather than inquiry.
What would some people do without their competitors?
— W. Edwards Deming
There’s a second cost that’s easier to miss. As Deming also noted, “The fact is that the customer expects only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He is a rapid learner.” Copying competitors doesn’t just follow the market—it trains it. Expectations ratchet upward, margins compress, and organizations find themselves competing harder while improving less.
In that environment, leaders can feel busy and responsive while the system itself remains fragile. The work becomes harder, not because people lack effort or skill, but because the organization hasn’t invested in understanding how results are actually produced.
Actionable Takeaways
Moving beyond imitation doesn’t require ignoring competitors. It requires changing how their ideas are used—and what questions leaders ask first.
Start with aim. Be explicit about who you serve, what problem you solve, and what “better” means over time. Without a clear aim, competitor behavior quietly becomes your strategy.
Turn examples into hypotheses. Instead of copying what worked elsewhere, ask why it might work—and what conditions would need to be true in your system for it to succeed. Treat every borrowed idea as something to test, not adopt.
Study the delivery system first. Offers, pricing, and positioning are system decisions. If you change the front end without strengthening the back end, you create stress—not improvement.
Use theory to learn. Deming said, “Experience teaches nothing… Without theory there is no learning.” Improvement requires prediction, testing, and reflection—not imitation.
A simple test helps ground this thinking. Before approving a competitor-inspired change, ask what capability must improve for the promise to be kept. If you can’t name it, you’re not improving the system—you’re decorating it.
Closing
Copying competitors feels safe because it spreads the risk. If everyone’s doing it, it can’t be wrong—right?
Deming challenged that comfort. When leaders stop borrowing answers and start building knowledge about their own work, something shifts. Learning replaces imitation. Confidence grows from understanding, not comparison.
Real competitive advantage comes from knowing your system well enough to improve it deliberately. When improvement becomes steady and capability compounds over time, the focus moves away from keeping up—and toward building something others struggle to copy.
Experience teaches nothing… without theory there is no learning.
— W. Edwards Deming
