Ideas are worthless, Execution is Everything.

Mar 1, 2016

I dare to disagree.

A lot of media say that Ideas are worthless. Yes. You can even google the exact words, “Ideas are worthless”. This is a most widely accepted mantra in Silicon Valley. But my philosophy in life has always been to question everything.

Can we really separate ideas from execution? What is the worth of a great idea? What happens to great execution with a bad idea?

Think of the world we live in. I want to give you an example of how ideas and execution operate from my point of view. Imagine you want to build a house or design your condo. You select your designer and your contractor. In this instance, the designer provides the idea and the contractor brings the execution. What would your requirements be? Would it be any design will do as long as they execute well? or would it be a nice design and good execution?

In Silicon Valley, the series, the main lead came up with the idea of the compression algorithm. Is coming up with the algorithm an idea or is it execution already? The other support characters made the idea a reality by building stuff around it. But what is there to build upon if the algorithm performed badly?

I think we tend to pay and value a person as the one making the idea. History is full of such examples for me.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter of course and she profited nicely in the billions of dollars. Is the act of writing idea or execution? If we argue that the novel was average and marketing it made Harry Potter the world wide phenomenon that it is, how many similar series have we seen who has reached the level of success that it achieved.

Picasso’s are priceless works of art. Is the actual painting the execution or is it the idea in Picasso’s head? He founded the cubism movement of art and provided a fresh point of view. Which part can we identify as idea and which part is execution? How about movies? The writer writes the screenplay and the producer makes it a reality. Can a great producer make a great movie from a bad screenplay?

How about the song writer? We make distinctions between singers who create their own songs and others who just do covers? Charice is a great singer, she can execute any song well, but what song of hers has been a great impact to you? Then there are the songwriters who produce hits after hits for famous artists. Is that idea or execution?

We also complain that majority of Philippine Commercials are forgettable. Is it because of bad execution or is it because of bad ideas?

Sun Tzu and his art of war, writing that, is it a great idea or great execution? Even in military strategy, we want people who can come up and strategize great ideas to win rather than focusing on the strength of the army alone.

We trust people who have vision. Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, JK Rowling, and JJ Abrams. Because we trust them to have great ideas and execution. In an ideal world, if execution is the only thing that matters, then we will only remember the great producers and contractors. All companies would be equal because they have the same resources of engineering, finance, sales and marketing. But in reality, they are not. Some companies come up with bad ideas, some come up with average ideas, and a select few come up with great ideas that change the world as we know it.

I think ideas and execution are really connected. The more we practice generating ideas, the closer we get to a great one. And a great idea has value and is not worthless. I believe a great idea with average execution will do more than an average idea with great execution. It is entirely possible that your great idea with average execution will not change the world, but I believe its a good starting point to reach your goal.