Two years ago we planted around fifty lemon saplings on our farm. A couple of them have grown exceptionally well and started fruiting. Our first thought on seeing them was a greedy one: how do we get more of these? So we have begun air layering. You wound a branch on the healthy plant and wrap it so roots form while it is still attached, then cut it and plant the rooted piece elsewhere. The new plant is a clone of its parent. We tried it on a few branches first as a pilot, and are now scaling up to fill the empty patches.

Somewhere in the process we noticed that we follow four common sense rules without anyone having formally taught us. We choose a healthy branch. We do not drain the parent. We wait for roots. We plant the clone in the right spot.

We pick a branch that is at least pencil thick. We do not layer too many on a single plant at one time, so as not to burden the mother plant. A wrapped branch looks the same for weeks, and cutting early kills the new plant. So we wait for 6-8 weeks before we open the layer. Finally, we plant the rooted cuttings in nursery bags for a couple of months before transferring them to the field, where the soil conditions can be very different from the mother plant's.

It is not only with lemon plants that we wish to create more of what is successful. We intend to replicate the success of products we have launched, projects we lead, uniquely talented people we hire and develop, and collaborations that are making us successful. But have we thought about the common sense rules we apply when replicating, or creating clones of, our successful products, projects, people or collaborations?

In our lemons, the rules seem to come down to four things that may hold well beyond the farm, at work and in life: be sure what we are copying is healthy and not just lucky; protect the original from being drained; give the new one time to take root before we cut it free; and prepare the new setting, because the field is never quite like the nursery. How do we multiply success deliberately rather than operating in auto-pilot mode?