Businesses May Benefit From Imitating Strategies of Second Best
August 2, 2012
TIME recently published a potentially controversial piece called “We Should Follow Those Who Finish Second, Not First.” It defies the common logic that we should look up to the best and brightest minds when developing business strategies.
According to the article, research suggests that the most successful and extraordinary performers may not have the best methods. Rather, greater value can be found in the strategies of those companies that are just under the top tiers of their field.
Some reasons for this assessment? a series of experiments, conducted by Jerker Denrell of the University of Oxford and Chengwei Liu of the University of Warwick, modeled after the results of a game played in many rounds found that:
“Over time, the most skilled players came to inhabit a second tier of reliable competence. Those who succeeded spectacularly — who took their places in the first tier — were often not the most skilled, but rather were those who got some lucky breaks early on or took big risks that happened to pay off. Emulating these top performers would probably lead to disappointment, since imitators would be unlikely to replicate their good fortune.”
While the article makes some interesting points, whatever happened to winning? If Google is number one in search, does that mean we should strive to be more like Bing?
Jasmine Ashton, August 2, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
