Behind Your Business

EVERY year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking for other companies’ ideas to adopt. Limited Brands, his clothing group, seeks lawful inspiration from firms ranging from airlines to consumer-goods manufacturers. Mr Wexner’s philosophy is that business should celebrate imitation.That is almost a heresy. Politicians and countless awards ceremonies extol innovation’s role in economic growth. Businesses are told to innovate or die. Imitators are cast as the bad guys: “The corporation that is first…has an opportunity to manufacture with the highest frequency and in the most desirable markets,” proclaims the boss of Burkett & Randle in “Duplicity”, a 2009 corporate thriller starring Julia Roberts. The firm duly triumphs over the evil rival which tries to copy its supposed cure for baldness.In the real world, companies copy and succeed. The iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. Apple imitated others’ products but made them far more appealing. The pharmaceutical...

TAKE the plot of “Jane Eyre” (rich man with issues falls for innocent young lass), strip away the introspection, add some S&M sex and you have “Fifty Shades of Grey”. E.L. James’s novel is the hottest book so far this year, having sold 2m copies in three weeks in America.The book’s appeal is obvious, says James Hall, the author of “Hit Lit”, who claims to crack “the code” of bestsellers. He reckons that every mega-hit is fast, emotionally charged and written simply, with a maverick hero who is in over his head. Each discusses a thorny issue and includes a pivotal sexual incident.But it is easy to see a pattern in hindsight. The money is in prediction, which is tough and growing tougher. This is because readers have more power than ever, says Joel Rickett, an editor at Penguin. Publishers used to be able to create winners by flooding stores with their picks. The bestseller lists of the 1980s and 1990s were dominated by brand names such as Stephen King and Danielle Steel. Industry mergers and bookstore monoliths made hype easy.But now readers can go online...

THREE hours’ drive from Beijing, Tianjin is home to the new assembly plant of Great Wall Motors. A banner along its outside wall declares the company’s motto: “Improving little by little every day”. Inside, signs everywhere urge workers to be inspired by the “Toyota Production System spirit”. Machines seem to outnumber people: labour is no longer cheap in coastal China. Banks of beefy robot welders, constrained in wire cages as if to stop them escaping, chug away relentlessly, making the human welders alongside look puny. The Tianjin plant will eventually turn out up to 1m vehicles a year, adding to the 500,000 that the three plants in Great Wall’s home province of Hebei, to the west, can produce. The company, like every other domestic and foreign carmaker in China, is betting that what is now by far the world’s biggest automobile market—18.5m vehicles...

NODDING donkeys, offshore platforms, refineries and filling stations are the bits of the oil industry you can see. A vast and largely invisible network of underground pipes joins them all together. It is worth a lot, which is why Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) said it would pay $5.3 billion for Sunoco on April 30th. It hopes to pull together two networks and shift more of America’s booming oil and gas output.ETP is ambitious. Last year its parent company, Energy Transfer Equity, agreed to buy Southern Union and its gas-pipeline network for $5.7 billion. The latest deal will make ETP the country’s second-biggest pipeline firm, behind Kinder Morgan, after the latter’s merger with El Paso is concluded later this year.Sunoco comes with storage facilities, 4,900 filling stations and the remains of a refining business that it is trying to spin off in a joint venture with Carlyle, a private-equity firm. But the pipelines are the main attraction. ETP currently operates 17,500 miles (28,160km) of the arteries that transport gas and natural-gas liquids such as propane and butane. Adding Sunoco’s 6,000 miles, built to carry crude oil and refined products, will reduce ETP’s reliance on gas. After the deal, 30% of its revenues will come from oil.This is important. In a few years shale gas’s share of America’s total gas output has gone from almost nothing to around a fifth. It will...