One line from my conversation with Fredrik Haren on Corey-osity Unleashed keeps rattling around my head.
It's not copyright. It's copying right.
Fredrik has spent decades travelling the world to study creativity. His point was simple. Every idea is a combination of earlier ideas. Copying, learning and adapting is how creativity works. The people who pretend otherwise are either lying or haven't looked closely at where their own ideas came from.
I've been chewing on this for months. The more I look back at my own career, the more I see it. My best ideas were never mine. I borrowed them, bent them, and made them fit a problem the original owner never saw.
Nobody starts from a blank page
In 1939 an advertising man named James Webb Young wrote a tiny book called A Technique for Producing Ideas. His first principle, as quoted by The Marginalian, was blunt: "an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements."
His second principle matters more. The ability to make new combinations depends on your ability to see relationships between things.
Read those two together and the lone genius myth falls apart. Creativity isn't a lightning bolt from nowhere. It's a collector's habit. You gather pieces from everywhere, then you spot the connection nobody else spotted.
Think about a furniture maker. Nobody invents the chair. Every chair you've ever sat on borrows legs, a seat and a back from thousands of chairs before it. The skill lives in what the maker changes.
Software runs on borrowed code
I've spent most of my working life around software, and no industry proves Fredrik's point better.
The Black Duck 2025 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis found open source in 97% of the commercial codebases it examined. On average, 70% of the scanned code had open source origins.
Sit with those numbers. The apps your bank, your doctor and your employer depend on are mostly code somebody else wrote, gave away, and let others build on. The commercial value sits in the remaining slice... the part where a team took the borrowed pieces and combined them into something new.
Every good engineer I've worked with learned by reading other people's code. You study how someone else solved a problem. You copy the shape of it. Then you change it until it fits your problem. Nobody calls this cheating. We call it learning.
If someone on my team spent a week writing their own date library from scratch, I wouldn't praise their originality. I'd ask them why.
Somebody stole the quote about stealing
You've heard the line "good artists copy, great artists steal." Steve Jobs credited it to Picasso.
Quote Investigator traced it back and found no solid evidence Picasso ever said it. The trail leads to W. H. Davenport Adams, writing in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1892, then to T. S. Eliot in 1920.
Eliot's version is the best one. He wrote the immature poet imitates and the mature poet steals. Bad poets deface what they take. Good poets "make it into something better, or at least something different."
I love the irony here. Every person who passed on a line about borrowing borrowed it, reworded it and improved it. Davenport Adams thought imitation was fine and stealing was shameful. Eliot flipped it. Jobs made it famous. The idea grew because people copied it.
Sam Walton built Walmart on other people's ideas
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, put it plainly. According to this piece from Every, he said "most everything I've done I copied from someone else."
The article adds a useful warning drawn from Michael Porter. Copy tactics, not strategy. Borrow the methods which help the business you're in. Don't copy someone else's whole reason for existing.
The same holds for your career. Steal the meeting format your favourite manager used. Steal the way a colleague opens a tough conversation. Don't steal someone's identity and wear it like a costume.
Copying right versus being a copyrat
Here's where people get it wrong.
Fredrik himself has a short video called Do not be a copyrat. His target is people who lift someone else's post or talk and pass it off as their own. It might feel harmless. It might even get likes. He calls it wrong, often illegal, and useless for building any reputation as a thinker.
So copying isn't the problem. Copying badly is.
I use three tests to tell the difference.
1. Credit
Name your source. Out loud. In writing. If an idea came from a podcast guest, a junior engineer or a book you read on holiday, say so. Credit costs you nothing and earns you trust.
2. Change
Eliot's test. Did you make it better, or at least different? If your version is a photocopy, you haven't added anything. Adapt it to your team, your customers, your constraints.
3. Context
Does the idea fit where you're putting it? A process which works at a 20-person startup might crush a 2,000-person company. Copying right means understanding why something worked in its original home before you move it into yours.
Where leaders get this wrong
Two failure modes show up again and again.
The first is "not invented here." A team refuses a perfectly good solution because another team built it. Pride beats progress. I wrote about how my own ego killed more ideas than my calendar ever did, and this is one of the ways it happens.
The second is worse. A leader takes an idea from someone on their team, presents it upstairs, and lets everyone assume it came from the boss.
My research found 99.5% of people have had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet a fair number of those bosses were idea thieves. Nothing kills a team's willingness to share faster than watching their best thinking show up in someone else's slide deck with no credit.
Copying right flips both. You borrow freely from anywhere, inside or outside your company. And you credit loudly, especially when the source sits below you on the org chart. As I've said before, the smartest person in the room is the room. Your job is to collect what the room knows, combine it, and give the credit back.
What I borrowed for this post
In the spirit of copying right, here's my source list.
The core idea came from Fredrik Haren. The "new combination of old elements" line came from James Webb Young. The poet test came from T. S. Eliot, by way of Quote Investigator. The tactics warning came from Michael Porter, via Every. The open source numbers came from Black Duck.
My contribution? Putting them in one place and adding three tests I use with my own teams. Nothing more. I'm comfortable with it.
Your turn
Think about the best idea you've used at work in the last year. Where did it come from? Did you change it to fit? And did you ever tell the person who gave it to you?
If the answer to the last one is no, send them a note today. It'll take two minutes, and they'll remember it far longer than you expect.