Learning from competitors: the work no one sees

In this Italian-language video, shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I talk about the Raphael exhibition and his preparatory drawings, and I say that measuring yourself against those who are further ahead and the invisible work of preparation are, in the end, the same thing. Here I explain why, through the drawings for one of his panel paintings, Giorgio Vasari’s account and a study by Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal on how companies learn from outside sources.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

I am at the Met, in New York. There is an exhibition here right now that I want to tell you about. It is called Raphael: Sublime Poetry. It is the first American retrospective devoted to Raphael. More than two hundred works, brought here from all over the world. There is one detail that keeps coming back to me. Raphael arrives in Florence at twenty-one. He finds Leonardo and Michelangelo already there, already giants, already established. He could have avoided them. He does the exact opposite. He studies them, he copies them, he absorbs their techniques. And then he tries to surpass them. He does not take on the giants by opposing them; he measures himself against them, learning from them faster than they teach.

What struck me most, walking through the galleries, were the preparatory drawings. The exhibition is laid out like this: next to each finished painting, dozens of sketches, second thoughts, attempts. Sheets with circles drawn with a compass, grids, heads redone ten times. Raphael did not get to the painting until he had explored a thousand possibilities on paper. A curator, in the audio guide, says something that stayed with me. She says that drawing is invention made visible. That is, real intelligence does not lie in the finished work. It lies in the process. In all the attempts that did not become masterpieces.

And at some point I stopped, because I was thinking about the work I do every day. Because these two things, measuring ourselves against those who are ahead of us and the invisible work of preparation, are in the end the same. You cannot bear comparison with the giants without a method behind you.

What we see as an elegant result is born from pages full of corrections and second thoughts.

The serenity on the canvas came from the turmoil on the sheets.

One thing before I close. I understand that it may seem strange to talk about exhibitions and art on a channel about strategy. For me these things are not separate. Strategic thinking takes shape here too, inside museums, in front of the drawings of those who came before us. It is part of my education, and I believe it should be a living subject for people who work in management too. Because strategy, before it is a method, is a way of looking.

The painting is the last of many decisions

The exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry, curated at the Met by Carmen C. Bambach, brings together more than 200 works and places the drawings beside the paintings, in sequences that run from the quick sketch to the study made from a three-dimensional model. Anyone walking through the galleries sees what came before the painting. I have talked about the same museum in connection with strategic thinking. The choice of what to show, and who makes it, is the subject of the video on the curator.

A documented example shows how much work lies behind a single figure. For the Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a panel painted around 1507–1508 and now in the National Gallery in London, we still have a pen sketch of the saint standing, with her head turned the other way, four studies on a single sheet in which Raphael begins to try out a three-quarter-length figure, and a study of the head. Then comes the cartoon, the same size as the panel, now in the Louvre, pricked along its outlines to transfer them onto the wood. On the panel itself Raphael changed the gaze and the face once more, and put a bush where a tower had been (Carol Plazzotta and Tom Henry, National Gallery, 2022).

Seen this way, the serene painting is the last of many decisions, and some of them come late. But the drawings also serve another purpose, which the video links to measuring oneself against the giants.

The preparatory work no one sees serves two purposes: it produces the result, and it gives you the ability to learn from those who are further ahead.

In Florence, Raphael learns from his competitors

Raphael arrived in Florence in 1504, at twenty-one, and stayed, on and off, until 1508. According to Giorgio Vasari, he had a specific reason for going: in Siena he had heard other painters praise the cartoon Leonardo had prepared for a hall in the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of the city’s government, and the nudes drawn by Michelangelo “in competition with Leonardo.” In Florence he studied them and copied them: the Royal Collection holds a pen drawing of his from those years that copies a Leda by Leonardo.

In the exhibition’s audio guide, Carmen Bambach uses the sixteenth-century word, concorrenza, competition: “He learns from Leonardo and then he tries to outdo Leonardo; he learns from Michelangelo, he tries to outdo Michelangelo.” From Leonardo he takes bozzare pronto, quick sketching. Catherine Whistler, an art historian who curated an exhibition of Raphael’s drawings with Ben Thomas at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2017, adds that this way of drawing opened up a new freedom for him, and that drawing thus becomes “invention made visible.”

That is the line I quote in the video. Vasari, who was a painter and an architect, had put it his own way in 1568: disegno, drawing and design at once, is “a visible expression and declaration of our inner conception.” On the sheets you see the reasoning, on the panel the conclusion. That is why museums are part of my education, and it is one of the reasons why classical and humanistic studies matter in work like mine.

To learn from those ahead, you need to know something already

Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Levinthal described the same mechanism for companies. In 1989, in the Economic Journal, they started from a simple observation: companies invest in research and development to innovate, and also to learn from competitors and from sources outside their industry, such as universities. In-house research therefore has two faces, and the second barely shows in the accounts.

In that essay the second face already had a name: absorptive capacity. The following year, in the Administrative Science Quarterly, they defined it as the ability to recognize the value of new information from outside, to make it one’s own and to apply it to commercial ends. And they argued that it depends largely on the knowledge the company already has in that field.

Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal, in 1990, defined absorptive capacity as a company’s ability to recognize the value of what comes from outside, make it its own and use it, and argued that it depends above all on what the company already knows.

An uncomfortable consequence follows, stated in their own abstract: this capacity depends on the company’s history, and a company that does not invest early in a field may find later on that the way to develop it is closed. Preparation cannot be improvised on the day a larger competitor enters the industry, or on the day an Italian company enters a country where its competitors are larger than it is, which is the starting point for the work of international expansion.

The comparison with Raphael has a limit: Cohen and Levinthal study industrial companies, with data on entire industries, not a painter’s workshop. It holds as far as the mechanism goes. In Florence Raphael learned quickly because he arrived with years of drawing behind him: by the end of 1500, at seventeen, he was already an independent master (Ashmolean Museum).

Learning does not mean chasing

Vasari also recounts what came next, with a nuance that applies to anyone who looks at a larger competitor. He writes that “for all his diligence and study, in certain difficulties he was never able to surpass Leonardo.” With Michelangelo, he understood that in painting the nude he could not match him, and decided to equal him, “and perchance to surpass him,” in the other parts of painting, without imitating his manner, “so as not to spend his time on it in vain” (my translation). He took what he needed from Fra Bartolomeo and from other masters, and by blending it all, “out of many manners he made one, which was looked upon ever afterwards as his own.”

Learning from those who are further ahead does not mean chasing them everywhere: according to Vasari, Raphael stopped imitating Michelangelo where he could not match him, and out of many styles made one, his own.

For a company, the lesson has a practical consequence. From a larger competitor you take what serves your own direction, and you leave the rest, even when it is admirable. What a company builds this way, through years of work on its own capabilities, also becomes the part that is hardest to copy, the part that acts as a competitive moat. A business strategy that knows how to choose what to learn also chooses what to defend.

A strategist’s work has its preparatory drawings too: the first months of an engagement are taken up with conversations across the whole company and choices discussed with the owners. Little of it shows from the outside, as I explain in answer to those who ask why an engagement lasts six months or a year. Those who choose to go through those months are investing in the part of the work on which everything else depends, and they deserve respect for it. The way a company learns, like the way it decides, is part of its culture: that is why the topic belongs to the work on organization and culture.

What to do and what not to do

• Before studying a larger competitor, write down what the company already knows how to do and what it wants to learn from that competitor.
• Continue to invest in the company’s own capabilities even when they produce no visible results.
• Keep the drafts and the discarded hypotheses: they are the material the company learns from.
• Do not copy a competitor’s result without understanding the work that produced it.
• Do not chase a competitor in the very field where it is strongest.

Sources

• Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal, “Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning and Innovation,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 35 (1), 1990, pp. 128–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393553
• Wesley M. Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal, “Innovation and Learning: The Two Faces of R & D,” The Economic Journal, 99 (397), 1989, pp. 569–596. https://doi.org/10.2307/2233763
• Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, Giunti, Florence, 1568, part III, vol. I, “Vita di Raffaello da Urbino,” pp. 66, 84–86; in the edition edited by Gaetano Milanesi, Sansoni, vol. IV (1906 reprint), pp. 320, 373–377; on drawing, “Della pittura,” vol. I (1878), p. 169. English quotations, except the one marked (my translation), from Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, translated by Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. IV, Philip Lee Warner for the Medici Society, London, 1913, and, for the definition of drawing, from Vasari on Technique, translated by Louisa S. Maclehose, J. M. Dent, London, 1907. https://archive.org/details/levitedepiueccel04vasa_0
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release on Raphael: Sublime Poetry. https://www.metmuseum.org/press-releases/raphael-sublime-poetry
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, audio guide for Raphael: Sublime Poetry, stop 603, “Florence and the Influence of Leonardo,” with Carmen C. Bambach and Catherine Whistler. https://www.metmuseum.org/de/audio-guide/603
• Ashmolean Museum, press release on Raphael: The Drawings, April 20, 2017. https://ashmolean.org/sites/default/files/ashmolean/documents/media/ashmolean_press_release_-_raphael_the_drawings_20.04.2017.pdf
• Carol Plazzotta, Tom Henry, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume IV: Raphael, National Gallery, London, 2022, entry for Saint Catherine of Alexandria (NG 168). https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/catalogues/plazzotta-and-henry-2022/saint-catherine-of-alexandria
• Royal Collection Trust, Raphael, Leda and the Swan, RCIN 912759. https://col.rct.uk/collection/912759/leda-and-the-swan