Generating sustainable competitive advantage is hard and it gets harder if your strategy to generate competitive advantage is to mimic the competition.

I was speaking to Rick Hubbard of Serena Software this morning and his quote (in the context of chasing “best practices”) aptly explains this.

Rick says – “The pill that cured your neighbour may be the pill that might kill you”

Every person and every organization is different. You can copy the actions but you may not be able to copy the results by simplying copying the actions.

If your strategy is to mimic – at best (and if you are lucky) you will catch up with your competition!