Steve Jobs once boasted that Apple has “always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Why? Stealing ideas effectively is not easy. It requires knowing which ideas are worthy of stealing and how to incorporate those ideas into your own creative process. Jobs learned how to steal from the best thieves: artists. So let’s start there.
Legendary poet T.S. Eliot observed “bad poets deface what they (steal), and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Similar quotes have flooded the zeitgeist since: Steve Jobs attributed “Good artists copy, great artists steal” to Picasso, others attributed it to composer Igor Stravinsky, and others still claimed it as their own (fitting, isn’t it?). What’s important is what it means. How you steal will determine the quality of what you create and the durability of your competitive advantage over other artists, entrepreneurs, etc.
There are at least three levels to theft, that generate increasingly powerful ideas:
You steal a successful idea and re-apply it in its original context.
You steal that successful idea and mold it to fit a new context.
You recognize what made that idea successful in its original context, and steal that process to create a new successful idea. To do that, you need to reverse-engineer the original idea to understand how it came about and then use that process to arrive at a comparable idea in the same or a different context.
The first level of theft is weak. You want something you don’t have, so you take it. In the short term, this can damage the value of the original idea by confusing consumers and watering down an entire category. For example, the artist Aboudia bases his paintings on one good idea stolen from Jean-Michel Basquiat, mask-like portraits rendered with expressive lines. This theft could temporarily weaken Basquiat’s brand and water down the whole category of Neo-Expressionism (the aesthetic category of artists to which Basquiat belongs). By analogy, a new chain of coffee shops called “Philipz” that serves bad coffee could weaken “Philz” reputation for serving great coffee. A casual audience could confuse Aboudia’s artworks for Basquiat’s and think less of the latter, or pan Neo-Expressionism as a whole.
You may be asking, So what? Let Aboudia live. If his success damages the value of Basquiat’s estate, let the heirs grovel. But that misses a crucial point: Aboudia is bound to fail. The gains from this first level of theft could disappear at any moment because they rest on ideas that are weak, whose competitive advantage is not durable. There is no loyalty among thieves and it is only a matter of time before a thief with more leverage (to distribute the stolen idea cheaply and widely) steals it for themselves. And the more that idea is stolen, the less value each iteration of it will have. Eventually, you are left with a commodity market in which that idea is virtually worthless. We see this happen with rival laundromats and restaurants continuously. As Peter Thiel warns, “rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past” (39). As more artists copy Basquiat’s expressive mask-like portraits, Aboudia’s paintings will become an indistinguishable commodity.
The loss to Aboudia’s career once the market catches up to his ruse will be total. But the loss to Basquiat’s reputation (and that of other great Neo-expressionist artists) is only temporary. There are dozens of great ideas in a great Basquiat painting: not only expressive mask-like portraits, but also complex combinations of color, enigmatic metaphors, found poems, a variety of scale and materials, to list a few. Aboudia stealing one idea is not going to damage Basquiat’s reputation to an informed audience. In the long term, it won’t even damage Basquiat’s reputation to a casual audience either. Basquiat paintings will still offer viewers a wealth of ideas, adorn museums walls, and command auction premiums. Imitators beware; as the great British rapper Stormy warns, you “couldn’t get where I’m going if you hopped in my ride.”
Now onto the second level of theft: stealing an idea and molding it to fit a new context. This creates incremental value by contributing something new that some context previously lacked, and which may even be systematically overlooked in that context because of deeply held biases.
One example are the paintings of Kehinde Wiley which brought Neoclassical painting style and motifs into a contemporary Black urban context. By molding this style in a new context, Wiley also shifts the context of his models, mostly working class Black men, into representations historically reserved for European royalty. This raises questions about difference and draws parallels between his subjects often boisterous dress and aristocratic taste.
Another example are the Film Still photographs by Cindy Sherman in which she recreates imagined Hollywood stills of female protagonists. These images brought low-brow Hollywood aesthetics into a fine art context and questioned tropes of how women are represented in film.
These artworks certainly create value, but that value is relatively incremental and could be understood as what Peter Thiel calls “horizontal progress.” Thiel defines this as “copying things that work,” for example taking one typewriter and building 100 or “taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere” (i.e. globalization) (6). One recent business example of this second level of theft is Ben & Frank. This startup took Warby Parker’s D2C model of selling stylish glasses at a deep discount and applied it to a new context: the Mexican market. Seven years into operation, Ben & Frank has over 30 retail locations in Mexico, nearly 200 employees, and are planning expansion across Latin America.
In the third level of theft, you recognize what made that idea successful in its original context, and steal that process to create a new successful idea. This creates new value altogether. But its more difficult to pull off because you need to reverse-engineer the original idea to properly understand the process (ways of seeing, thinking, and doing) that it emerged from, and then you need to carry out that process yourself. An example from art is the work of Pablo Picasso, who stole ideas from endless sources in European and African art over the course of his career. He developed a deep aesthetic understanding of how African sculptors from Cameroon manipulated planes of the face to create expressive and dynamic portraits. He then integrated those ideas with countless others from European art history and beyond to create layered masterworks. This third type of stealing generates more “original” work not because Picasso was the sole “origin” of his work but because he was a crucial origin of that work. So crucial, that very few of his contemporaries were able to blend those same diverse sources into such poignant artworks.
It comes as no surprise that Steve Jobs cited Picasso as a model thief. He advised, “expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing” (PBS). Jobs forged a culture at Apple of stealing from the best by learning how they approached a problem. The Macintosh 128K was the first personal computer optimized for user experience and was a commercial success. Under Job’s guidance, the development of this computer integrated learnings from technologies at companies like Xerox and Microsoft (like a Graphical User Interface, mouse, and displays with windows). Apple reverse engineered and then optimized these features to augment existing user workflows (like office filing and typewriting) and anticipate new ones altogether (like digital file sharing).
This third level of theft is the road less travelled by: it requires intense engagement and personal effort. But it builds a foundation for how to arrive at successful ideas and thus creates a true competitive advantage. This constitutes what Peter Thiel calls “vertical progress.” Rather than relying on artificial monopoly that destroys value to mimic scarcity, this third level of theft produces monopoly organically: the products or experiences it creates are so new that only one entity (artist, company, etc) can provide them. That is, until someone reverse engineers what you have done and supplants it with something revolutionary in its own right.