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18.08.2026
Nobody is stealing your ideas
Read Time: 8 Minutes
Hello
Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I have to share two things.
The first: I recently launched Kit.ceo Enterprise, which is essentially positioning-as-a-service that allows you to scale and sell strategy without the department or hire. This is for agencies and studios whose core competency lies elsewhere, such as design, branding, or sales.
The second: here are two articles I wrote worth exploring.
1. What Ramp owns in the customer’s mind
2. What you, your kids and your customer believe and yet you deny it at work
Why do the people we look up to give away their best ideas?
David Ogilvy ran one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world, and then he wrote down how his agency made advertising and put it in a book that anybody could buy. Toyota let its largest competitor move into one of its factories, walk the floor for 25 years, and take notes. Rory Sutherland stands up in public and tells you exactly which channel is beating the one everybody else is using, and gives you the numbers to back it up.
None of these are careless people. They are not confused about competition, and they are not doing it out of charity. The easy explanation is that they were so far ahead it cost them nothing, which is possible and which I will come back to at the end. The explanation I think is closer to the truth is that all of them had already seen what happens when you hand a rival your best thinking: almost nothing.
Three stories show you why, and the third one is the one that will change how you think about it.
The man who tells everyone exactly what works
Rory Sutherland has spent years telling anybody who will listen that a letter in an envelope still works. Not as nostalgia, as a live channel that beats digital on the numbers he cares about. He talks about a campaign where he wrote to roughly 20,000 people and asked them to do the client a small favour, and he says the response rate was above 100% because the people who got the letter passed it on to others. He gives the method, the reasoning and the numbers, in public, for free.
Disclaimer: I should tell you where I read that, because it matters. The quote appears on a website run by Marketreach, Royal Mail’s marketing arm, and Royal Mail is in the business of getting you to send more mail. He names no client and no date, and nobody independent counted the responses. So I do not believe the number, and I have no way to check it.
The part I do believe is what he says next, because it costs him nothing to be honest about it and it needs no trust from me at all: “Even when your direct mail works brilliantly, your penny-pinching, digitally-fixated competitors won’t copy you.”
Here is a man giving away a method he says beats what everybody else is doing, and he is not worried, because he has watched for years and they do not take it. Mail is expensive and old; it costs real money for every person you reach, and you cannot show anybody a dashboard full of clicks on Friday afternoon. The marketing director who wants to try it has to walk into a room full of people who decided a decade ago that mail is what dinosaurs do, and argue for spending more to reach fewer people. She might win that argument. She will own it if the campaign is soft.
Rory wrote the rule down in his book. You can never be fired for being logical, and it is much easier to be fired for being illogical than for being unimaginative. The idea was never locked up. It was sitting in the open the whole time, and the people who could have taken it were busy protecting themselves.
The room where 20 people said no
Richard Thaler once ran a session with the heads of 23 divisions of one company, with the CEO sitting there in the room with them. He put a deal on the table. Imagine an investment for your division that comes down to a coin flip. Heads, the company makes $2 million. Tails, it loses $1 million.
3 of the 23 said yes.
Thaler then turned to the CEO and asked what he wanted; the CEO said he wanted all 23 of them to take it, which is obviously correct. Run that bet 23 times, and the company clears something like $11 million with almost no chance of a bad year overall. Every one of the 20 men who said no could do that arithmetic in his head. They were not confused, and they were not badly informed. They understood the bet perfectly and turned it down anyway.
They turned it down because a coin flip is not a portfolio when you are the one calling it. Roughly half of them would end the year with a loss sitting on their record, and each of those men has one career, one boss and one review, and the boss does not get to average him against 22 other people. The company wanted the bet. The man had to live with the outcome.
That is the same shape as the mail. In both rooms, the information was free, complete, and understood by everyone present. What stopped people was that acting on it would cost them personally, in a way unrelated to whether it worked.
The factory GM was invited into and still could not copy
The third story is the one that changed how I think about this, and it takes a while to tell, so stay with me.
In the late 1970s, General Motors ran an assembly plant in Fremont, California, and by any measure it was a disaster. Bruce Lee, who ran the union local, later called it “the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States,” and he was not exaggerating for effect. On a normal day, 1 in 5 workers didn’t show up, and some mornings there weren’t enough bodies to start the line, so managers walked across the street to the bar and hired whoever was drinking. Workers who wanted to hurt the company dropped loose bolts and Coke bottles inside door panels so the finished car would rattle for whoever bought it. One man, suspended for drinking, went down the line leaving the bolts loose on the front suspension of about 400 cars. Vehicles came off the end with the engine in backwards, or with no steering wheel at all. GM gave up and closed the plant in 1982.
Two years later Toyota reopened that same building as a joint venture with GM, and called it NUMMI. Toyota wanted to learn how to build cars in America. GM wanted to learn how Toyota built cars so well. Toyota agreed to hire back the same men, and over 85% of the workforce came from the plant GM had just shut down, with the same union leadership in place. GM did not want that. Bruce Lee insisted, and his reason was one sentence: “I believed that it was the system that made it bad, not the people.”
Within a few months, the cars coming off that line were rated near perfect. Bruce Lee’s memory of it is that “they hit the ground running. It didn’t take a year, two years, to get quality in that product.” Defects per 100 vehicles came in among the best in America, matching the same model built in Japan. A study cited in the same program found that the old way of running the plant would have required 50% more workers to build the same car. Grievances collapsed, absenteeism collapsed, and men who had spent a decade sabotaging cars started caring how the cars turned out.
Same building.
Same men.
Same union.
Roughly one year.
So, what’s the lesson? GM owned half of that plant. GM managers could walk the floor any day they wanted. GM sent 16 of its best young managers to work inside it and learn the system from the inside, and Toyota flew groups of 30 Fremont workers to Japan for hands-on training. There was no secret and no locked door. GM had a live, working, fully documented example of the thing that was beating it, running inside its own joint venture, and it had that access for 25 years.
It never managed to copy it.
Jeffrey Liker, who has been teaching and consulting on this system since the 1980s, tells a story about a GM manager who received an order from a vice president. The order was to go to NUMMI with cameras, photograph every square inch of the place, come back and make his own plant look exactly like it, and then there would be no excuse for why GM quality was lower. Liker describes what went through that manager’s head the moment he heard it: “Immediately, this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy employee motivation; we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy, and you can’t even take a photograph of it.”
He was right, and the reason is easiest to see in a rope. All along the NUMMI line, cords hang down within reach of every worker. Pull one and a light comes on, a little tune plays, and your team leader comes over to help you fix whatever went wrong. Pull it again, and the entire line stops until the problem is solved. GM did install those cords in its own plants, along with the Japanese inventory methods, because the hardware was the easy part and you can buy rope. Then, in GM plants, workers were shouted at for pulling the cord, and in a few plants, managers cut the cords down.
Those managers were not idiots. For 40 years, a GM worker had been taught that the line never stops. Bruce Lee: “You saw a problem, you stop that line, you were fired.” Rick Madrid: “I saw a guy fall in the pit and they didn’t stop the line.” A manager named Ernie Schaefer laid out the thinking behind it: if you give men the ability to stop the line, they will stop it constantly to get themselves a free break. So the same rope hangs in two buildings: in one, it means asking for help; in the other, it means confessing to a failure. What decides which one it means is what the boss does in the 10 seconds after somebody pulls it, and there has never been a camera that can capture that.
Ernie Schaefer is worth following, because he actually tried. He ran a GM plant in Van Nuys, 400 miles south of Fremont, building Firebirds and Camaros, with a reputation for defects, sabotage, and union fights that was not far from what Fremont had been, and he was facing a shutdown. He had visited NUMMI, and he believed the Japanese system could save his plant. This time Toyota was not there to run it, so GM had to do it alone, and Schaefer got the same union leader who had made it work at Fremont to come down and help him sell it.
Watch what actually stopped him. Some of his own managers fought the idea of ever stopping the line because their bonuses were paid based on how many cars came off it, and the defect count never entered into their calculations. Under the team system, executives and workers were supposed to share one cafeteria and one parking lot, which the managers at NUMMI had accepted without much fuss, and Bruce Lee’s description of the Van Nuys managers is that “they rioted.” They told Schaefer they would resign as a group. Lee remembers the phone call he got: “Bruce, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do those things.” Lee’s answer was that they would have to walk 20 yards further to their cars.
The workers fought him too, for reasons just as real to them. Rotating through every job destroyed the seniority men had spent whole careers earning, and the plant stood to lose a quarter of its workforce under the new method. Larry Spiegel, who was there, said: “There were too many people convinced that they didn’t need to have to change.” On top of that, Schaefer could not get decent parts because NUMMI took many of its parts from Japan, while his suppliers had never worked that way and ignored him when he asked them to fix things. His verdict on the whole attempt was that “an isolated plant can’t do this by itself.”
Quality never improved. GM shut Van Nuys in 1992, and 2,600 people lost their jobs. The easy read of that story is that the knowledge was simply too deep to transfer, and part of it was. Then look again at what actually beat Ernie Schaefer. A parking space. A bonus formula. A seniority rule. A supplier who would not return his calls. Some of what stopped him was genuinely impossible to copy. A lot of it was grown men who did not want to.
The rest of the story is short. Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson went through the record and concluded that “despite this flood of research, it took General Motors more than two decades to imitate Toyota’s practices consistently.” GM’s share of the US market fell from 46% in 1980 to 20% in 2009, and the company went bankrupt that year. The methods did spread through GM eventually, mostly carried by managers who had personally worked at NUMMI or Saturn and slowly moved into other jobs, and it landed in the 2000s, too late to save anything. Steve Bera, one of the original 16 sent into NUMMI, said the strangest part was that nobody at head office ever debriefed them: “Instead of coming back to the 16 of us and saying, there’s some secret sauce here, what is it? How can we use this to our advantage? No one ever asked us that question.” He quit after 2 years.
Why the three stories are the same story
You already know this from your own kitchen. Somebody who cooks better than you gives you their recipe, gladly, holding nothing back, and you follow it exactly, and it comes out worse. The recipe said to cook until done but did not tell you what “done” looks like. It said a splash, and their splash is a different size than yours. It never mentioned that they turn the heat down when the pan starts to talk, because they do not know they do that. They have made it 200 times, and you have made it once. They gave you everything they knew how to write down, and it still was not enough.
That is the second reason your work stays yours. The first is the one from the mail and the coin flip, which is that using somebody else’s good idea costs the person doing it. It costs standing with their peers, or a bonus, or a parking space, or a clean year on the record, and none of that shows up in the case for the idea. More proof does not fix it, because proof was never the missing piece. The two reasons run together far more often than they run alone. Ernie Schaefer had a parking lot problem and a supplier problem in the same month, and it is not obvious which one killed him.
So when you look at your best idea and feel it is something someone can pick up and carry off, you are looking at it the wrong way. It is three things stacked on top of each other. There is the description of it, which anybody can take today and which is the only part publishing gives away. There is the nerve to actually do it, which is far rarer than it looks. And there is being genuinely good at it, which took you years and which does not transfer through a document, a tour, or a photograph of every square inch.
The one time it does go wrong
Everything above is a story where nobody copied, and I chose all three, which means you should not trust the pattern until you have seen me look for the opposite. So I did, and it did not take long.
Snapchat’s product was completely public. Anybody could download it and see exactly what it did. Facebook copied the heart of it and shipped Instagram Stories in August 2016, and Snapchat’s growth rate dropped by roughly 82%, a number that appears in Snap’s own filing before it went public. Within 8 months, Instagram Stories had passed Snapchat’s entire daily user count.
Both protections failed at the same time, and that is what it took. Nobody at Facebook felt foolish copying, and nobody’s career was at risk, because the boss had ordered it and the whole company was pointed that way. And Facebook already had every hard part sitting in the building: the engineers, the users, the distribution, the practice. There was no parking lot fight and no supplier who would not pick up the phone.
That is the exception, and notice how specific it is. It needs somebody with real resources who is already focused on you and can simply build the thing.
What this means for you
Every story I have told you is a large organization, and large organizations are where both protections are strongest, because that is where careers, bonuses, parking spaces, and 40-year habits live. If you are one person selling advice, the people most able to lift your method are other people selling advice, and they have no boss to look foolish in front of and no 25-year system to rebuild. So do not take too much comfort from a car plant.
Run three questions before you publish anything. Would a smart rival look like an idiot in front of their own boss doing this, and if so, publish it, because that is the mail. Could they get your result straight off the page, or would they need years of reps they have not put in, and if they can get it off the page then keep it. Is anybody with real money already aiming at you? If so, go slower with the thing; they would move on, because that is Snapchat. The middle question also tells you exactly what to hold back: a price, a guarantee, a checkout flow, a subject line, a term in a contract, a supplier, a list. Those get lifted in a week by somebody who takes no risk and needs no new skill.
I publish for a living, so this piece argues that my own business model is safe and that you should discount it for that reason. If I am right, I gain a reader, and if I am wrong, you publish something you should have kept, and you pay for it while it costs me nothing. There is also a reading that undercuts me: that Rory and Toyota can afford to give things away because they are so far ahead that openness is free, and their generosity is a result of winning rather than a cause of it. I cannot rule that out. What tips me the other way is Fremont, because Toyota handed the same men back in perfect working order; GM watched the plant run with the doors open for 25 years, and GM still could not do it 400 miles down the road.
So take the best thing you know, the one you have been sitting on, and write it out properly with the method and the numbers and the parts that make you nervous. If it passes the three questions, publish it this week with your name on it and stop rationing it. Then spend the rest of the week on the thing that actually protects you: whatever makes the method work in your hands, not in somebody else’s. The client you turn down. The step you refuse to skip when the deadline is tight. The 200th time you cook the dish. That is the parking lot and the bonus formula, and it is the part nobody can photograph.
—Paul Syng
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If any of this was useful
There are three ways to go deeper, depending on where you are.
1. Read and follow.
Everything I publish is free. The Gravity Reports, the Digest, the positioning frameworks — all of it is on the blog and in your feed and inbox.
LinkedIn or X
2. Use the systems.
I’ve built a set of diagnostics for founders and brand leaders who want to do this work on their own company. Start with the free Analyzer — it shows you the gap between what you think you sell and what customers actually buy, and tells you whether AI recommends you when buyers are searching in their language. If you want to go further, the Clarity Kit and Monopoly are built for the same diagnostic, at a deeper level.
Start with the free Analyzer
CEO Clarity Starter Kit
Monopoly
3. Work together.
I take on a small number of advisory clients each year. These are founders and leadership teams who want an outside read on their position — the same method as the Gravity Reports, applied to their own company. If that’s relevant, the best place to start is a conversation. Better call Paul.
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