It’s funny.  Over the past few months, I find myself using similar advice when I am talking to clients as part of consulting assignments and to staff as part of ongoing mentoring and management. Obviously, the context is different, but the advice is often eerily similar in terms of the reasoning behind the advice.

The most recent instance of this overlap in approach was related to the idea of emulating others. 

Many of our clients will ask us, “What are others like me doing?” when we are exploring options for addressing their asset management needs. It is human nature to want to “be like others like you”.   It is ingrained in our biology. Fitting in and being accepted by a group for being “like” was key to survival in prehistoric times.  Most people don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of any approach.  

In recent years, there have been a lot of leadership and self-help books published on the power of habits.  With this has come the idea that to be successful, you should do what successful people do.  For those of you old enough to remember, there was the “Be Like Mike” campaign for Gatorade, which told all of us back in 1991 that if we wanted to be successful like Michael Jordan, we needed to drink Gatorade. I hear people all the time saying they are following someone’s daily routine, thinking that it will lead them to success.

The issue for both our clients and our colleagues is that there is no “One-Size-Fits-All” solution to anything.

Let’s say you are a small to medium-sized University with a three-person Asset Management Team.  Trying to emulate the program of a neighbouring University that has a 10-person team would be impossible.  The same would be true if you are not a morning person and you try to emulate someone who gets up at 4:30 every morning to do their highly creative work.  No matter how hard you try in either situation, you are unlikely to get optimal results.  

Instead of just trying to recreate what someone else is doing, I recommend that both our clients and my team take the pieces of what others are doing, which fit within their specific context (organizational or personal), and build a path that is customized for their specific situation. If you don’t have clarity on your strengths, weaknesses, and available resources first, you may end up heading in the wrong direction. 

Don’t try to be someone else. Chart your own course and build on what other people are doing, but curate it to fit your own personal/organizational situation.