In the fast-paced world of biotech start-ups, there's a counterintuitive truth that many executives overlook: The surest way to mediocrity is imitating excellence. It's a bold statement, but one that carries significant weight in today's rapidly evolving business landscape. As leaders, we're often drawn to the allure of "best practices" and the strategies of industry success stories. We study their moves, attend conferences to learn their secrets, hire their staff, and eagerly implement their tactics in our own organisations. But what if this approach is fundamentally flawed?
The siren song of "best practices" is hard to resist. After all, why reinvent the wheel when others have already paved the way to success? The appeal is clear: by emulating top performers, we hope to shortcut our way to similar achievements. It feels safe, logical, and legitimate. When questioned about our strategies, we can point to successful precedents and industry norms. It's a comforting approach that seems to minimise risk and maximise potential.
However, this mimetic behaviour – the tendency to imitate others – can lead organisations down a dangerous path. The hidden dangers of imitation are numerous and potentially catastrophic. At its core, blind imitation can result in severe strategic misalignment. What works for one company in its specific context may be entirely inappropriate for another.
Consider the cautionary tale of Dendreon Corporation. In the early 2000s, Dendreon was a rising star in the biotech world, developing Provenge, an innovative immunotherapy treatment for prostate cancer. After receiving FDA approval in 2010, Dendreon attempted to model its commercialization strategy after big pharmaceutical companies, investing heavily in a large-scale, centralized manufacturing process and an extensive sales force.
However, this approach, which had worked well for blockbuster drugs in large pharma companies, proved disastrous for Dendreon as Provenge required a complex, personalized manufacturing process that didn't benefit from the economies of scale of traditional drug production. The result was a spectacular failure. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2014 and sold to Valeant Pharmaceuticals (now Bausch Health) for a fraction of its former valuation.
This example underscores a crucial point: there are no universal solutions in business. The myth of one-size-fits-all strategies is pervasive but fundamentally flawed. Every organisation operates in a unique context, shaped by its history, culture, resources, market position, and a host of other factors. Ignoring these contextual elements in favour of blindly copying others' success formulas is a recipe for disappointment at best, and failure at worst.
So, if imitation and universal best practices are off the table, what's the alternative? The answer lies in the power of organisational alignment. This concept revolves around developing a strategy, capabilities, practices, processes, and systems that are genuinely in tune with your organisation's DNA and are arranged (and if necessary, rearranged) in such a way as to best support the fulfilment of its purpose, mission, goal, and objectives. It's about understanding your company's unique strengths, weaknesses, culture, and goals, and crafting approaches that leverage these distinctive elements.
When an organisation's strategy, capabilities, practices, processes, and systems are aligned with its core identity and context, magic happens. Employees are more engaged because they are working in ways that feel natural and meaningful. Resources are allocated more effectively because they are focused on initiatives that truly fit the company's capabilities and goals. Furthermore, customers respond more positively because they experience a consistent, authentic brand at every touchpoint.
Take Ginkgo Bioworks, for example. This synthetic biology company has built its success not by copying others, but by staying true to its foundational vision of making biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo's commitment to this vision is not just a marketing ploy – it is deeply ingrained in every aspect of the business, from its innovative "foundry" approach to bioengineering to its collaborative business model. Rather than focusing on developing its own products, Ginkgo partners with companies across various industries – from pharmaceuticals to agriculture to cosmetics – to help them create bio-based solutions. By leveraging its strengths in bioengineering and maintaining a flexible, partnership-based model, Ginkgo has been able to apply its technology to a wide range of fields without straying from its area of expertise.
So how can executives resist the urge to imitate and instead focus on developing context-relevant strategies? Here are five key steps:
1. Deep Self-Understanding: Invest time and resources in truly understanding your organisation. Why do you exist? What are your core competencies? What is your unique culture? What are your genuine strengths and weaknesses? How are you strategically positioning? This self-knowledge is the foundation for organisational clarity.
2. Regular review: evaluate your strategy, people, practices, processes, and systems to ensure they remain aligned with your organisational context and the changing business environment. Re-align as necessary.
3. Encourage Critical Thinking: Foster a psychologically safe culture where employees at all levels feel empowered to question the relevance of new practices against the backdrop of a clear organisational context. This can help prevent or catch misalignments early.
4. Focus on Outcomes, Not Methods: Rather than copying specific tactics, focus on the outcomes you want to achieve. Then, develop methods to reach those outcomes that fit your unique context. Leverage the innovation in your people. Experiment with ideas on a small scale. Test, learn, and adapt before rolling out major changes.
5. Celebrate Distinctiveness: Recognise and reward initiatives that leverage your organisation's unique attributes. This reinforces to employees what matters and how you deliver value.
The path to alignment isn't always the easiest. It requires deep reflection, careful analysis, and the courage to forge your own way. There are choices and trade-offs to be made in doing so. Consider which strategically valuable capabilities will you need to develop for competitiveness in future. Will superior execution be vital to recovering and rescaling your product-centric business? Or customer agility for customised and highly differentiated offerings to market? There is a challenge for leadership here as excellence in one area tends to preclude excellence in other areas. For example, extreme efficiency and extreme flexibility make for uneasy bedfellows. Whichever you choose your answers to these questions will define your long-term organisational priorities.
It might mean saying no to trendy practices that don't fit your organisation, even when peers are enthusiastically adopting them. It might mean developing novel approaches that raise eyebrows in your industry.
But the rewards of this approach are substantial. Organisations that resist the urge to blindly imitate and instead focus on building an aligned strategy are more likely to achieve sustainable success. They are more agile and resilient in the face of change, more innovative in their problem-solving, and more compelling to both employees and customers.
While the temptation to copy successful companies is strong, true excellence comes from aligned and context-relevant action. As a leader your challenge is to resist the siren song of blind imitation and instead dive deep into understanding what makes your organisation unique. Embrace this uniqueness, align your strategy with it, and you'll be on the path not just to success, but to a success that is sustainably, authentically yours.
The business world doesn't need another Genentech, Moderna, or Amgen. It needs you, your company, with its unique strengths and perspective, operating at its highest potential. So, the next time you're tempted to adopt the latest industry best practice or imitate a successful competitor, pause. Ask yourself: Is this truly aligned with who we are and what we need to succeed? Your answer to that question could be the difference between mediocrity and excellence.
At Alignment Cubed we share the view that there is no single "best" way to lead an organisation, make decisions, or structure a company. Instead, the most effective approach depends on the specific situation or circumstances at hand. What works well in one situation may not work in another. Situational factors matter. Context is key.
We advocate for leaders to adopt a strategic approach to the alignment of their organisation over the short and long-term. Take a moment to complete our Organisational Alignment Index (OAI) to see how your company stacks up.
Alignment Cubed supports busy biotech CEOs, providing them with an accelerated pathway to organisational alignment as their company scales and becomes more complex, and priorities conflict. To understand how Alignment Cubed can help you, contact Jonathan or Majid.
Want to dive deeper yourself?
The following resources cover a range of topics including leadership theory, organisational behaviour, innovation, and strategy. They provide a mix of academic and practical perspectives that can help you deepen your understanding of the concepts discussed in the article.
- The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni - provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health.
- Align by Jonathan Trevor - provides a blueprint for how strategic alignment can be effectively developed, implemented and sustained.
- State of Readiness by Joseph Parris - the organisational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies.
- Good to Great by Jim Collins - why some companies make the leap to superior performance and others do not, emphasising the importance of finding what works for your specific organization.
- The Contingency Theory of Leadership by Fred Fiedler - this seminal work introduces the concept that effective leadership depends on the situation.
- Situational Leadership Theory by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard - focuses on adjusting leadership style to the maturity and readiness of followers in various situations.
- Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant - explores how leaders can champion new ideas and fight groupthink.
- The Risky Business of Hiring Stars by Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohria. Harvard Business Review, May 2004 issue - discusses the pitfalls of hiring star performers from other companies.
- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen - introduces the "Jobs to be Done" theory, which encourages companies to focus on their unique value proposition rather than imitating competitors.