Involve Your Sales Staff its mirror and replicating those elements that made the other so notable. Is this the highest form of flattery? Not if you consider who is typically doing the flattering. When the insecure, the desperate, the shallow of vision and values, and the financially marginal choose to be "like you," it unavoidably diminishes the sheen on your practices. As those practices, originally attributed to your organization, are screwed up by others, some of that dysfunction can find its way back to your reputation. Ultimately someone has a revelation: Maybe what works for one company might not work for another. This moment of prescience is always short-lived. An- other blinding flash of success is revealed in scholarly writings, and off the startled lemmings run. There was more to the story of the Southern manufacturing firm. Before the limelight of discovery, they had started their existence quietly enough. They were a start up, formed from scratch, with an operating style all their own from day one. They had no competing history or play- ers from a previous regime. They had no ingrained political rituals to overcome. Everyone who came on board was told to leave their baggage at the door. If you snuck some other competing culture across the thresh-