Ideas Are Garbage and Just ‘Executing’ Doesn’t Matter.
‘Ideas are worthless, execution is everything’. Yes and no.
Take a deep breath.
Exhale slowly, for a count of three to five seconds.
Did anything happen? Nope.
Nothing.
That’s pretty much what ideas are made of.
Ideas, as bountiful and free they may be, are the realm of the never-were’s and wantepreneurs. It’s just air. I’ve used up a lot of it in my day.
So that’s when the old adage, ‘ideas are worthless, execution is everything’ comes in. It turns out that there’s much, much more to it.
Just Do It
No.
The marketing eggheads over at Nike weren’t talking about taking out a mortgage to fund a disastrous fidget spinner distribution empire (remember those?), they were trying to get people off their coaches and into their shoes in the pursuit of looking and feeling like the sleek warriors emblazoned on their advertising.
True, inaction is the difference between a wannabe and an actual entrepreneur but this advice is not without it’s issues because this is how it’s put to people:
Just Do it.
Do what?
Anything.
Just execute.
Just execute? We’re inundated with ‘just execute’ . It’s never about the quality, speed or flexibility of the process. There’s scant discussion or dialogue about how ‘execution’ is itself executed.
If you’re going to just flail around with blind fold and a bat hoping to hit the pinata, you’re not going to have much luck.
Developing your product with little to no customer input or feedback is the same thing.
Deliberately seeking out confirmation bias to support your beliefs is the opposite of research. It’s stunning how often this happens.
Customers and investors aren’t going to wait for X iteration in a sea filled with sharks. Beta testing is for those with capital B budgets, you’re going to want to get it done right.
And even then companies will fail, not because the product was trash, but because they didn’t develop a viable market. They were swinging at a pinata in the desert, instead of a family backyard.
You’re going to have to do more than just ‘do’. Research is going to be involved. Quite a lot of it, in fact. Nobody likes to talk about it. It’s just not sexy. People want to be the guy with a startup, with the business card that says CEO on it.
Everyone wants to be Steve, when in fact you’re going to have to be Woz.
You’re going to have to do more than just do. You’re going to have to…
Do It Right
The #1 trait an entrepreneur needs is a bias for action, effective action.
Not mere busy-work as time wasting distraction, or blind activity for it’s own sake vs actual pro-active action.
The #2 trait is knowing the difference.
Good execution requires having a “systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it,” argue Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan in the book “Execution.” Most organizations, they say, don’t face reality very well. It’s the manager’s job to force his organization to face reality, and then to deal with it.
— What are the Keys to Good Execution? The Wall Street Journal
Which brings us to what effective action and execution is.
How do we reach both?
Research
Research should be a priority, an active extraction of useful grounds upon which to proceed.
Seek to learn from every mode of action. Ignorance is rust that clogs the gears of the machine you’re building, and gained knowledge is the grease.
Got some downtime? (How the hell do you have any?)
Then test.
Market test. Dispel all doubts both for yourself and your customers.
Debug, smoke test, A/B test, test it on a kid (if your product is software, not if you’re making bear traps) etc.
Your objective is to disprove negative assumptions about your product.
Starting out? Change your perspective about your business, view it as a research lab where you suss out the best possible results for your products. Pay attention to customer feedback, who are going to be more valuable in their responses than a million books.
In this get-things-done world, many well-intentioned business people default to a jump-to-solution approach to problems and challenges. Sometimes they get lucky and a quick solution works. Yet just as often, hair-trigger problem solving can produce the illusion of course correction while it merely wastes resources.
— Bias For Action? Avoid The Oops Factor; Rodger Dean Duncan, Forbes
An entrepreneur with a bias for effective action is different from the run of the mill. Take starting a sit-down restaurant, for example. Instead of getting the ball rolling on a location right away, how about doing a viability test like a pop-up restaurant, which is temporary and far less of a budget hit?
A food truck to scout locations. Test location A vs B. Find out foot traffic routes, competitors. Observe which locations get more action, compare how your offerings hold up against theirs etc. Using all this information, THEN you can get started thinking about the brick-and-mortar.
It’s not that complicated but it’s not often seen, much in the way common sense is uncommon these days.
Just merely ‘executing’ is walking forward without a plan, blindly hoping to walk through walls and float over crevasses.
Pro-active research and effective action provides information, confidence and momentum that will propel you and your venture towards success.
So just don’t ‘do it’.
Do it well.
