Let’s End the Myth that Ideas Are Worthless

It's not that ideas don't matter. It's that 'new' ideas are almost always not new and have been done to death. What the idea is has never been a point being refuted by most people, what's being refuted is that the idea is what makes the difference. Lot's of people had the idea of online restaurant reservations, but that doesn't mean that everyone that brings that idea to fruition we'll be successful. It's a matter of execution that will increase any possibility of actually making it.

He mentions change.org - which shortly after it launched had several competitors. It wasn't until the company changed the way it was executing that it succeeded. If any of the other companies had executed better with the same idea then change.org would not have been a success. So it all came down to superior execution.

Everyone has ideas, not everyone can execute on them. Look at facebook/myspace - can you honestly say that facebook isn't a better executed social network?

Ford became a significant car company through a combination of some pretty radical ideas: cars cheap enough to not be luxury goods; assembling cars on an assembly line like a meat-packing plant; mass-production factory workers being paid as if they were skilled artisans, not day laborers; and the vanadium steel that finally made the Model T possible. Ford's ideas about worker pay were so radical that they gave rise to Dodge v. Ford, where the court ruled that he was operating his business as a charity against the interests of his investors.

Wal-Mart's supply-chain automation is legendary throughout industry.

GE was founded on the idea of using charred bamboo for a lightbulb filament --- an idea that made practical the replacement of gaslights with electric lights --- and, more generally, Edison's invention of the modern industrial research lab, which produced the practical incandescent light above and a number of others. (More details at http://edison.rutgers.edu/list.htm)

HP was founded to commercialize an improved design for an electronic audio oscillator.

AT&T's history starts with some ideas cooked up by Bell (or maybe Elisha Gray) and continues through more than a century of continued innovation. They've abused their power to suppress innovation any number of times, but they've also had to carry innovation forward merely in order to survive the company's growth.

Now, most of these ideas weren't original to these companies. To my eye, what distinguishes the companies is that each of these companies made big bets on those ideas. If they'd bet too much on the wrong ideas --- as GE nearly did with direct current --- they would have gone broke.

Of course, picking good ideas to bet the company on isn't sufficient. You also have to have the discipline to execute those ideas. But if you're executing dumb ideas with great discipline, you aren't going to be "X done right". You're going to be "X done wrong".

Both are less than perfect but at least a blind squirrel has a chance at stumbling on a nut in the forrest. The paralyzed squirrel can see the nuts but will never get them on their own.

It might be true that a bad idea with flawless execution is just as bad as vice versa, but the thing is, too many of the self-described 'idea' people don't actually have any 'idea' of how to implement and bring their vision to life. They just want it to magically happen. Those are the people with worthless ideas, because they're not even ideas, they're just delusions of grandeur.

On the other hand, I've met my fair share of legitimate idea people who also have an idea of how to architect and implement want they want in a real, functioning web application, they just would rather have someone else, who's really into it, dig in to the nitty gritty implementation specifics (read: code) while they do the high-level technical and strategical architecting. That's totally fine, and those type of idea people are far from worthless IMO.