Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters

http://www.inc.com/rob-adams/2010/06/ideas-commodity-but-execution-intelligence-matters.html

by klous • 16 years ago

32 26 16 years ago

Retric4• 16 years ago

You often hear this but it's completely wrong.

Intelligence and Execution was not going to save Pet's.com or all those other .COM's based on stupid idea. If anything assuming Execution is what's important is a great way to separate a sucker err Investor from his money.

PS: A good idea is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for success. Shipping CO2 to Mars is not going to make you money end of story.

rmah• 16 years ago

A minor clarification: there was nothing stupid, per se, about selling pet related products online. It was their execution that was horribly flawed. Others have executed on the "sell pet stuff online" idea and succeed to one degree or another.

Retric4• 16 years ago

Why limit yourself to selling "pet stuff" online?

Edit: There are advantages and disadvantages to selling Pet stuff online. (Bad: tends to be low value per weight and vary fragmented dogs, cats, fish, birds. aka Dry fish food is reasonable to FedEx 50lb bags of dog food less so. Good: Large market and ???) Clearly you can make money selling pet stuff online but there is little reason to do that over selling kitchen supply's online.

danhak• 16 years ago

Yes, all things being equal, the idea itself could impose an upper limit on success.

Gormo6• 16 years ago

I agree that a good idea is necessary but not sufficient for success. But I think the article makes an important point in calling ideas a "commodity": what is more fungible than the same idea in two people's minds?

You can get good ideas for free. Excellence at execution is much more expensive.

dhimes• 16 years ago

I think the comment by MS on the original site is worth a read. Basically: you need both a great idea and great execution.

Being tall won't guarantee that you'll be a great basketball player, but it's very, very difficult to be a great basketball player if you are not tall.

theBobMcCormick• 16 years ago

I'd love to read a good, impartial post-mortem of Pets.com. It's brought up in so many conversations about the .com era, but never with any concrete details.

I would assume that the big problem with pets.com was their execution. Just the amount they spent on advertising alone must have been almost impossible to recoup.

Tycho2• 16 years ago

And what is execution but a series of related, more specific ideas? (plus capital)

bena• 16 years ago

Work. The difference is work or effort.

It doesn't matter if you have 50 excellent ideas each day, you are going to be outclassed by the guy who has one mediocre idea that he executes relentlessly.

Because that is the one quality that separates the successful from the unsuccessful: tenacity or perseverance. No matter what, you keep trying. Failure isn't a showstopper, just an indication that you need to modify your strategy. Keep plugging away at it and you to can find yourself with an overnight success after 10 years.

Tycho2• 16 years ago

Work is just another form of capital, even if it's your own. I mean consider one person has an idea for a product, and they sketch out their requirements then employ engineers to build accordingly. Let's say another person has an idea then with their own skills builds a more successful product. Was the second person more successful because they worked harder than the first - no, because they didn't necessarily work any harder than the engineers that were commissioned. The difference, however, could be that along the way the solo worker came up with many additional ideas which he could then add to the project.

I agree with the notion that one great idea ALONE does not guarantee success. But that's different from saying ideas are worthless.

Gormo6• 16 years ago

Sure, but there's a distinction between the ideas that set the goal itself and the ideas that inform the strategy that gets you to the goal.

The article is saying that a creative strategy toward any goal is superior to to a mediocre strategy toward a creative goal.

moultano• 16 years ago

There's a much better way to say this that isn't controversial or link-bait. It's also very old.

"The devil is in the details."

Gormo6• 16 years ago

That's really the contrapositive, though. That proverb says that "not understanding the details will lead to failure", but the article is saying "master the details if you want to win".

Different set of connotations. We want to find success, not Satan, in the specifics.

dustingram• 16 years ago

A similar post by Scott Adams 2 weeks prior:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/

arman0• 16 years ago

Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. So, you do need to worry about who you disclose your ideas to.

Gormo6• 16 years ago

Concisely: you are more likely to succeed if you try to build a mousetrap better than if you try to build a better mousetrap.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious software patents dealing with non-trivial algorithms like compression, encryption, etc.).

So many software and business process patents would have been thought of by so many different people, it only faced with the situation. So in that sense I think, yes, many, many ideas are really commodities. Where ideas are not commodities are, for instance, breakthroughs in logic like Haskell Curry or Kurt Goedel made.

contextfree• 16 years ago

I find that the hard thing, at least for me, is coming up with a good idea that's also practically implementable under the particular constraints and context you happen to be in. I can come up with plenty of ideas that might be good in some context other than mine, and plenty of boring ideas that work in my context, but the combination of both is elusive. That's why I'm still working for other people and haven't tried to go into business for myself.

astartup1• 16 years ago

This is completely wrong for some obvious reasons

1. If ideas meant nothing there would be no patent and trade secrets.

2. Big companies are very good at execution but start-up still can compete against them. Most of the times because big companies don't have or don't value ideas that start-ups adopt.

3. Most people making this argument haven't had any great ideas themselves. "Ad hominem" attack but people need to reflect and make up articles.

4. Author is referring to iterating on initial idea as execution. I think, that is also part of creating idea not exactly execution.

Seed however small holds everything to generate a large tree. What is important? Soil and water or seed...

Tichy• 16 years ago

"through a management team with superior execution intelligence"

Isn't that just a more fancy way of saying "a management team with ideas"?

Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters

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