The Myth of the Great Idea

Great Ideas Change. Great Companies Don’t.

TL;DR: Great ideas change and become obsolete. Great companies adapt and evolve. Focus on creating the latter.

The world of business has become over-romanticized.

There are too many sexy startup narratives about a small band of misfits coming together to defy all odds and create the next big idea.

I get it. We all love a good story. It’s part of being human. How else do you explain the ability of the entertainment industry to make millions from major motion films and breakout best-selling novels?

What these stories don’t share are the boring, seemingly mundane aspects of building and scaling a massive company.

Admittedly, I am still in the early stages of this process. I haven’t scaled a company past five people; I haven’t built an application used by billions (yet); I haven’t written a best-selling business book filled with internationally-recognized studies.

What I have done is paid attention. I’ve done (and am still doing) my homework. I continue to study the past, present, and future of countless successful companies that have existed longer than I have been alive.

After all of this time, I’ve noticed something worth mentioning:

Every company has (at least) two identities. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call them the introvert and the extrovert.

We’re all familiar with the extrovert. It is the public-facing narrative constructed to appeal to our emotional side. It exists solely to win over customers, investors, and other essential shareholders. Hollywood makes money from exploiting it and repackaging it for the masses. In general, the extrovert is stuck in the past, obsessed with sharing the story of its founders, the trials and tribulations it overcame, and the big idea that started it all. The extrovert can’t help but share stories of dorm room scheming and garage plotting.

On the hand, we have the hard-working, under-appreciated introvert. Every company relies on this identity to make things happen. This pragmatic side is responsible for creating processes, systems, and mechanisms necessary for organizing all of the day-to-day chaos. Without help from the introvert, no company is able to successfully scale into the future. Unfortunately, you will never see movies featuring the introverted side of a company. After all, organizational design hardly makes for dramatic characters on screen.

These two sides are essential for a company of any size to succeed.

The issue: no one wants to talk about the introvert. People don’t necessarily care how the sausage gets made; they just want to hear about high stakes negotiations, exotic business trips, and the cutthroat journey up the corporate ladder of success.

This is great for the every day Dick or Jane but extremely toxic for the entrepreneurs responsible for balancing the introvert and the extrovert.

As a human, it is far too easy to get swept up in these semi-fictionalized stories and forget about the introvert.

After all, without the introvert, all you’ll have are great stories, and nothing else. You won’t have a product that people want. You won’t have a functioning organization built for growth and sustainability. You won’t even have the patience to look past current trends.

Great ideas change and become obsolete. Great companies adapt and evolve to meet any challenge they face in the future. We should all focus on creating the latter.

Are you balancing the introvert and the extrovert while building your company? How so? Share your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter at @williamfrazr.

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