If A Strategy Were Easy, Everyone Would Already Be Doing It
The conversation at school board retreats has a familiar shape. Someone says, "We should be more like [insert name of another school]." It might be about a curricular shift, a tuition strategy, a building campaign, a wellness program, or a reorganization of the leadership team. The school being praised is always well-regarded in the market. The implicit theory is that if the move worked there, it will work here. Copying a well-regarded peer is one of the most reliably tempting moves in school strategy, and also one of the worst.
The seduction of copying is that it converts a hard problem (what should we do?) into an easy one (what are they doing?). It outsources the hardest cognitive work — making a defensible judgment about your own institution's situation — to a peer school's leadership team. It feels disciplined because there's now a model. It feels safe because the model is observable and the other school’s reputation unimpeachable. It feels collaborative because everyone in the room can rally around a concrete goal. And it offers, as a free bonus, the implicit defense if things go badly: "Well, [peer school] did it too."
None of those reasons has anything to do with whether the move is strategically sound for your school.
The Competitive Logic of Easy
Michael Porter's most-quoted line is that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. The less-quoted corollary is that easy-to-copy strategies are not strategies at all. They are, at best, table stakes — features you must match to stay in the game. They cannot generate a true competitive advantage because someone else is already doing it.
Hamilton Helmer makes the same point more forcefully in 7 Powers. Genuine competitive power, he argues, requires both a benefit (something customers value) and a barrier (something that prevents competitors from neutralizing the benefit). The barrier is the part most schools ignore. A new STEM lab is a benefit. So are a new wellness curriculum, a redesigned advisory model, and a renovated dining hall. Whether any of those things creates a barrier — something other schools genuinely cannot or will not match — is a separate question. In most cases, the answer is no. The thing your peer school did is, almost by definition, the thing your school can also do. That is why it was easy to identify.
The logical implication is straightforward, if uncomfortable: if a strategic move is easy to copy, it is too easy to matter. The moves that produce real institutional distinctiveness are the ones that require something other schools either cannot replicate or are unwilling to attempt. They tend to involve genuine hard choices — about mission, about which families you are not for, about what you are willing to be bad at to be very good at something else, and about which traditions you will finally let go.
Mimetic Convergence
The deeper pattern here is mimetic convergence, something we have written about here, here, and here. René Girard's observation that humans desire things primarily because others do so turns out to describe school strategy with embarrassing accuracy. Schools end up wanting what their peer schools are seen to want — a particular admissions narrative, a particular inclusion program, a particular capital project, or a particular head profile. The result is a sector in which schools that began with genuinely distinctive missions slowly reconverge on the same handful of moves, making them progressively harder for families to distinguish.
This is the meta-version of the easy-is-bad argument. Each individual copying decision feels prudent. The cumulative effect is sectoral homogenization, which destroys the very distinctiveness that mission-driven schools rely on for enrollment. You cannot charge a premium for being like everyone else. You also cannot recruit the families who chose your school because it was different from the school down the road if you have spent the last decade becoming more like the school down the road.
What Hard Actually Looks Like
The harder path is not glamorous and rarely involves a grand reveal. It usually looks like a series of challenging questions that school leaders are willing to consider for longer than is even remotely comfortable.
What is genuinely true about our school — not aspirationally, but actually — that no peer school can credibly claim? Where would we be willing to disappoint a constituency to remain coherent? Which families are we, honestly, not the right school for, and are we prepared to say that out loud during the admission process? Which of our beloved programs exist because they serve the mission, and which exist because no one has been willing to challenge them? If we eliminated three things we currently do, what would they be, and why have we not eliminated them?
These questions are hard because they demand foresight in the face of uncertainty, with no peer school to point to for cover. The board cannot benchmark its way out of them. The head cannot delegate them to a committee. The strategy cannot be cribbed from a conference panel. They generate disagreement, often along lines that do not break neatly. They take longer than the strategic planning calendar allows. And the answers, when they finally come, are usually difficult to defend in the short term because real differentiation always looks like an unnecessary risk until it works.
That difficulty is the feature. The reason hard strategic work produces a durable advantage is the same reason it feels unpleasant in the room: very few schools are willing to do it. If the work were easy, everyone would already have done it, and it would confer no advantage. The schools that emerge from the next decade with genuine institutional health will not be the ones that copied best. They will be the ones willing to make the harder, lonelier, less-defensible-in-the-short-term choices about who they truly are.
A Discipline, Not a Slogan
None of this is an argument for novelty as such. There are plenty of hard things that are also stupid. The discipline is to insist that any move under consideration pass two tests rather than one. The first is whether it would help. The second, which schools tend to skip, is whether it would help us in a way another school could not easily replicate within eighteen months. If the honest answer to the second question is no, the move belongs in the operations bucket — fine to do, not a strategy.
The role of a board and of the head's strategic counsel is to keep that second question alive in the room, especially when the first question has produced an exciting answer. The pull toward what the peer school did is gravitational. The work is to resist that pull long enough to ask whether the harder version of the question has been attempted. Usually, it has not. Usually, that is where the strategy actually is.