The Value of Ideas

Reminds me of Ed Catmull's talk about Pixar management at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc#t=21m50s -- "If you have a good idea and you give it to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it, or they'll throw it away and come up with something else."

This post is just plain wrong. Obviously it's tempting to get caught up in ideas and ignore execution, but saying ideas are flat-out worthless is simply being ignorant of history. A few examples:

- Creating an assembly line to mass produce cars in the early 1900s was a good idea. It clearly wouldn't have gone anywhere without execution, but if Henry Ford had instead decided to execute flawlessly on a hand-painted rock business the results would have been far different.

- Starting a software-only company in the late 70s was a good idea. I'm sure most people here know Microsoft's story well enough to understand the importance of execution in this case, but they never would have achieved the same level of success if they weren't executing on a big idea ("a computer on every desk and in every home").

- I think you could argue that the company that makes Snuggies has executed their idea as well as possible. But because of the nature of their idea they will never be anything more than a flash-in-the-pan business. There's nothing wrong with that type of business, but the potential is much smaller.

Yes, your idea matters. It determines what market you'll be addressing and ultimately sets the upper limit for your success. The real problem is that people get caught up in ideas because they're more fun than executing. Realistically the time spent on the idea should probably be a fraction of a percent of the time spent on execution. Pick an idea that you think you can execute on and that has large enough potential, then focus 100% on execution.

On a tangent: Is XKCD really the most-viewed comic on the internet?

I wonder what people like Scott Adams thinks of it or whether they even get it. He understands technology but XKCD is geeky beyond that.

Scott completely misses this important fact:

Some ideas (really collections of ideas) are easier to execute in one medium than another.

Rather than some larger commentary on ideas versus execution the complaint that "X wouldn't make a good movie" is usually meant in the sense that the things that made X good in medium A would not translate well to medium B, where B==film.

For instance I think it's perfectly fair to say that it's not a good idea to make Lord of the Rings into a musical.

You may counter that the execution is everything, but I'd respond that if you made a good musical out of the material, it wouldn't be LotR -- it would be some vaguely related thing. It would necessarily lose some of the things that make LotR great.

While I greatly admire Ed Catmull and his insights into teams, I don't think his "good team will fix bad idea" comment is relevant here. Part of implementation is choosing your implementation medium. Pre-specifying the medium (i.e. let's make X into a film) is an implementation decision.

It would be analogous to a startup saying "let's take this great system and re-implement it, but it has to use technologies UVW". That's an implementation decision that may be badly flawed.

"Does he honestly believe that a movie about Batman eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about me?"

You're confusing execution with the idea. The idea of you sitting around eating a bowl of cereal might seem boring, until you look at other ideas.

An author sitting around a hotel in the middle of winter. (The Shining) A mother and son sitting in a car. (Cujo) Office workers dealing with life. (Office Space) A man trying to get a rug. (The Big Lebowski)

The idea (A Dilbert movie) isn't the execution. It's merely the idea. A movie about you doesn't have to be boring. But the execution of it could result in a boring movie.

The problem with ideas is people always refer to the idea as bad, yet point to perceived execution as the reason. Just because an idea is good doesn't mean it's going to be a good movie.

A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

I think Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example. Really, a comedy about POWs in WW2? Really?