3 Dangers of ‘Ideas’
Ideas are sometimes overvalued and sometimes under. In general, the startup world treats ideas as worthless and execution as everything. In some of my recent disparate interactions, several conversations came around the difference facets of the same idea — ‘idea’
Interestingly, these 3 dangers I’m talking about have a bigger chance of happening chronologically as your startup grows into a company.
Danger #1- Hanging on to your own sweet idea
‘I have an idea’ — that’s where most of the startup companies are born
Sidenote: I’d much rather have someone say ‘I have identified a problem statement worth solving’ than ‘I have an idea’
Our ideas are always more valuable to us. It is our baby. I have seen a lot of founders valuing their own ideas a lot and get stuck in a circle going about the same axes rather than moving on.
But I think there is a lot of literature about this already. So, I don’t want to explain this much further. My parting note on this one:
- Define a timeline (6 months to a year max)
- Define a success metric
- If you don’t hit the success metric in that timeline. Stop it and go, do something else.
Danger #2 — You’re an Idea machine and you’re proud of it
A lot of people pride themselves on the fact that they are idea machines. They wake up every day with a handful of ideas. It could be a good thing until it isn’t.
As your startup company progresses, it becomes incredibly important for founders or senior leadership to NOT be idea machines.
I have seen CEOs coming up with random ideas/projects, despite receiving push back from the leadership, piloting the ideas. Here is what is really happening.
You’re the CEO. You read an interesting article on HBR and boom — you have an idea💡
You’ll take the link, put it into an email and send it to your leadership; 8–15 people, along with your commentary of the idea.
Now, for them, their CEO sent an article and 15 people will spend time reading the email and article a couple of times. Remember, companies’ 15 topmost resources are spending their time
Then, they will start figuring out who should own this, what is to be done, some will support, some will push back and the ball is rolling.
Now, imagine this for every idea that comes top down.
The company is on a wild goose chase, ALL THE TIME
There is no focus, prioritization isn’t possible, teams are always confused and the long list of dysfunctions that you can imagine.
My Solution:
I don’t really believe everything in my head is gold. It is SUPER critical to realize this. In my opinion, 8/10 are bulsh*t ideas, 1 is decent with others’ input and 1 could be really good.It is good that Founders/CxOs have ideas. But, I don’t get my team wound up on my ideas right away. I will let the idea stew in my mind at least for 4–5 days, sometimes for weeks. If the idea keeps coming back, again and again, then I will start giving it merit.
Once I’m convinced about the idea over a few days, I will still introduce the idea to my team as an enquiry, a question and not as a statement. Basically, I’m validating my thought with the smart people around me who we have hired.
Danger #3: Chasm between an idea and its successful execution
I see this more prevalent beyond the startup phase of the company. Some people think of themselves as think tanks (some consultants are big on this. They even call themselves as ‘think tank team’).
They will come up with ideas or suggestions which admittedly are good. However, they aren’t fully mindful of the distance and fuzziness between the idea and its final output.
There is design, dependencies, timeline, priorities, technology limitations, tech debt, effort to impact ratio and a gazillion other things that impact the successful implementation of an idea.
One mistake they do here is — founders will give an idea, everyone will like it and will come up with a rough timeline. Founders will leave the idea for now and will come back towards the last phase of implementation.
When the founders see the implementation, it won’t look anywhere close to how they imagined it in their heads. This causes rework
Solution (Not mine) — I read somewhere that the curve of involvement should look something like below (I don’t remember the original graph). I think this approach makes sense.
It should start as high involvement, be involved in the early part of figuring out. In the first 20% of time, 80% of challenges will be figured out, then let the product teams work on the problem and flesh out the details.
Arjun Pillai is a 2X founder with successful exits both times, most recent one to ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI). He is currently the SVP at ZI and writes about startups, self awareness, team building and related topics.
