It's a bit of a weird one! I think the most famous example of the term comes from Richard Feynman, in his essay "Cargo Cult Science" (http://calteches.library.c

It's a bit of a weird one! I think the most famous example of the term comes from Richard Feynman, in his essay "Cargo Cult Science" (http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm): > In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. It's about copying others to achieve a goal — but because you aren't copying the motives, only the visible methods, you don't succeed. In this case, it's about copying the engineering practices of big organisations without being a big organisation yourself, in the hope that you become one. Hope this helps.