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The Value of Ideas

285 points by alexandros 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
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mixmax 16y ago
A lot of first-time entrepreneurs (me included) make the mistake of believing that the right idea is paramount for success. As Adams points out that's not true. It's getting old but it's still the truth: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything
- ilcesco 16y ago
  I might be a rampant first-time entrepreneur wannabe, but I still believe ideas have a little value. I'd rather say: Bad ideas are worthless, great execution makes the difference.
m0th87 16y ago
Seems like an over-simplification to me. An idea without execution is worthless. But execution without an idea is pretty worthless too. Even if I mastered execution, I couldn't sell a product that costs you $100 and punched you in the face every time you used it, because it's a shitty idea.
- philk 16y ago
  Of course you could. The target market would be masochists and they spend money on those kind of products/services already.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Gifts for people you don't like?
- osipov 16y ago
  Agree. Different ideas have different execution and value potential: for example an idea to dig a cubic foot hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere has a different potential than an idea about how to solve the financial crisis.
- bdotdub 16y ago
  This reminds me of this post from Derek Sivers: http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
- moron4hire 16y ago
  boxing trainer, boom. I tried to come up with one myself (shitty idea) and thought I had one with "beer that tastes like urine", but then I realized that such a product could conceivably find a market with alcoholics trying to condition themselves against drinking. So yes, even Miller and Coors still have a market (sorry, home-brewer joke).
  - jimbokun 16y ago
    "I tried to think of a shitty idea with no potential market, and came up with 'beer that tastes like urine.' Then I realized Miller and Coors beat me to it." (trying to show the importance of the execution of an idea)
    - moron4hire 16y ago
      Okay, how about clothing that melts away when it gets wet? Got anything there?
      - Xurinos 16y ago
        Sounds like something you would go to your local "sensual items" shop for, and given Rule 34, it likely already exists. Certainly some candied versions do.
      - ajdecon 16y ago
        If it's a lot cheaper than regular clothes, make it fashionable/slutty and call it disposable club-wear.
  - deleted 16y ago
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- subbu 16y ago
  Only if master executors were dumbos. As someone pointed out above, good executors fix mediocre ideas.
philk 16y ago
This is a fantastic post by Scott. I think the great idea fallacy continues because it appeals to people's fantasy of becoming successful without much work. Anyone can imagine themselves having a great idea and then being successful. It's a lot harder (and less pleasant) to imagine taking an unremarkable idea and spending years of hard work to make it succeed.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  The whole concept of the "great idea" is skewered brilliantly by the Windows 7 ads. We all get a good chuckle watching someone tell us straight faced that, just because they thought of something that could have been better about Windows, they can now take credit for it after Microsoft successfully implemented it in Windows 7. Could be useful as a reference the next time someone has a business idea that he "just needs a tech guy to implement."
  - grinich 16y ago
    It looks like their agency is still Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. For reference, here's some of their other work: Laptop Hunters - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU Gates/Seinfeld - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=relat... Good News (Kylie) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU Seems like a strange way to advertise.
    - aditya 16y ago
      CP+B also did the famous (and awesome) Burger King Get a Whopper for defriending friends campaign.
      - grinich 16y ago
        I just saw that they also did the BK Freakout, where they pretend the Whopper is discontinued and watch people go nuts. Talk about customer loyalty. http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/whopper-freakout.html http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/whopper-freakout.html
Sukotto 16y ago
You'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn't succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn't fail if the execution were left to morons. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Words to live by. I often have to re-evaluate my own thinking because I tend to fall into the trap of waiting for a better idea.
- billswift 16y ago
  Theodore Rubin, in "Overcoming Indecisiveness" wrote: "The Big Fact is this: In very few instances is one decision actually better than another. "In the majority of issues, almost any choice can be converted into a constructive decision." His point is not to waste time and energy dithering - it is the commitment to making a decision work that is most important. Just substitute "idea" for "choice".
CapitalistCartr 16y ago
An idea that's the right goal or vision for me probably wont be the right one for you. What makes an idea good for me is who I am. Pursuing a great idea for making a better stove is probably not the right goal for me. But it was for Fred Carl, who founded Viking Range. Dreams, visions, goals are specific to the right people.
timf 16y ago
Saying ideas are "worthless" is a hyperbolic way to put things. Why can't people say "an idea's relative importance is not as big as many people think." I think Derek Sivers puts it nicely, it is a multiplier (but yes you need to execute in the first place): http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
- deleted 16y ago
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- mrvir 16y ago
  Yes, provocative illustration, but very entertaining, I admit. The magic trick was to reduce every idea to one word or one sentence. Can be used to make any movie plot sound weird.
mad44 16y ago
"Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." I don't agree with the first part. Are you guys suggesting execution is mechanical? A good execution requires a lot of ingenuity and creativity and taste. So there again, good ideas are crucial.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  Perhaps the correct phrasing is "Ideas without execution are worthless." Ingenuity, creativity, and taste locked up in your own head and not executed are worth nothing to the world around you.
Gormo 16y ago
I'm reminded of the common argument that some proposed solution "works in theory", if only the practice could be sorted out. But the concept of things working or not working in theory is meaningless - whether something works or not is inherently a question of practice. Outside of execution, there is no way to assign value to a theoretical model.
arethuza 16y ago
A slight nitpick: Hogan's Heroes was about a prison camp for Allied POWs - not a concentration camp.
- mynameishere 16y ago
  http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108January1967Page8Medium.gif http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108Janu...
zachbeane 16y ago
Reminds me of Ed Catmull's talk about Pixar management at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc#t=21m50s 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."
ccc3 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
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- jasonlotito 16y ago
  None of your examples detracts from what he is saying. Your suggestion comes down to level of success. Your examples only work if Henry Ford would be considered a failure if painted rocks didn't lead to as much success as cars did, despite the evidence that rocks, painted and unpainted, are still a market.
  - ccc3 16y ago
    He concludes his post by saying: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. The only way that's true is if you consider success to be binary. Either you succeed or you fail. But level of success is important in terms of economic value and it is demonstrable that the idea is a factor in level of success.
deleted 16y ago
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statictype 16y ago
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.
- pigbucket 16y ago
  Scott could be a Supergeek for all I know, but XKCD is typically aimed at the lower rungs of the geek ladder. Even so I think it comes up with brilliant ideas all the time, and succeeds despite the relatively mediocre execution. (You have to use the words 'idea' and 'execution' differently from Scott to see it that way, but that's part of the problem with an ill-defined opposition like idea/execution)
ajscherer 16y ago
"You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is." This is ridiculous. Does he honestly believe that a movie about me eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about Batman? Why do some movies get made and others not if it is meaningless talk about the worth of an idea? Are studio executives using some random process to determine which movies get made? Do they have no idea what a movie or an idea is? Clearly it is meaningful to talk about the quality of ideas, and right now there is nothing else to talk about with regard to a Dilbert movie. He has a valid point that the quality of the idea is a marginal factor in the success of any endeavor, but he generalizes it to the point of absurdity when he claims you can't discuss the quality of an idea. This sort of careless generalization seems typical of his blog posts that make it to hn, but I suppose thats why he is drawing cartoons and not proving theorems.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  "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?
  - ajscherer 16y ago
    "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." This is exactly what I meant when I said that the quality of an idea is a marginal factor in the success of an endeavor. I fully agree that execution should be the main focus. What I was trying to say is that not all ideas are equal. You can always make a worse movie with a better idea, or vice versa, but some ideas are easier to pull off than others. Given the exact same level of execution, "Batman fights the Joker" will beat "Random nobody in Nebraska sits in the dark eating cereal" every single time. If all ideas are of equal quality, why would Hogan's Heroes be an excellent example? Wouldn't all examples then be equally good or bad? Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example precisely because the idea is harder to pull off than other ideas. If you gave Hogan's Heroes and American Idol each to 100 teams to turn into a show, I believe American Idol would become a hit with greater frequency than Hogan's Heroes.
JabavuAdams 16y ago
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.
mynameishere 16y ago
Here's the world's worst opinion on movie making: here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic. Can anybody name even a single, solitary reason--even one--why the story of the Titanic could be considered anything other than a fantastic idea for a movie? The only thing I can come up with is "It's been done (successfully) too many times already", but that actually disproves the general assertion. I mean--it's up there with WWII and James Bond as far as great movie ideas go, and yet, he says "worst"? Bizarre.
- jdlegg 16y ago
  Show business, being primarily driven by the profit motive, tends to focus on ideas to which an audience can relate and enjoy. The story of the RMS Titanic, being one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, is generally antagonistic toward these ends because most (not all) people don't like thinking about the possibility of dying on an ocean-liner and do not enjoy watching it happen to others. It should be clear how these two are in opposition. For this reason alone, conventional thinking would call a movie about the Titanic a "bad idea." The movie worked, though, and made a billion dollars because the director executed it in such a way that it actually wasn't about a sinking ship and people drowning, it was about something else. And this other thing (call it the human spirit or what-have-you), overcomes the tragedy of the situation to make it something the movie-going audience could relate to and enjoy. From a more technical perspective, the Titanic story could be considered a "bad idea" because, on the surface, the plot should hold no surprises to anyone: boat sets sail, boat hits iceberg, boat sinks, passengers are drowned. The remarkable thing about the Titanic film is that EVERYONE knows how it's going to end, even before they sit down to watch it. This, according to conventional wisdom, would be a bad idea as far as show business is concerned. Who wants to see a movie like that? Yet audiences returned to theaters multiple times. It is a credit to Cameron's direction that the film could overcome such a large, inherent obstacle in the Titanic storyline.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - mynameishere 16y ago
seanlinmt 16y ago
"The value of an idea lies in its execution"
- iworkforthem 16y ago
  Spot on! Whether it make or break an idea lie with the ability of the entrepreneur and its team.
jfornear 16y ago
The "execution is everything" mantra is tired hyperbole. Of course 'the idea' is worthless if it's nothing.
- subbu 16y ago
  That's the whole point of the article. He is saying that in the context of an idea.
lukev 16y ago
Some ideas are easier to execute than others. It is certainly possible to create an award-winning movie about two gay cowboys, but I bet there are far fewer writers/directors who could pull it off than those who could produce yet another successful romantic comedy. So if your one goal is to make a successful movie, your chances of success are probably better if you choose to do a romantic comedy rather than a movie about two gay cowboys. Unless, of course, you are confident in your ability to make an amazing gay cowboy movie, in which case you should do it. In other words, execution is everything, but that doesn't mean you should ignore ideas when deciding what to do.
michael_nielsen 16y ago
What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless? The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable. Of course, that's false, as Adams says. Value is associated to scarcity. Easy-to-have ideas aren't valuable, simply because they're not scarce. An idea like the Ricci flow is valuable, because very few people are capable of having it. Ditto the ideas behind deep algorithms. PageRank had value in large part because relatively few people had the depth of insight required to come up with it. Come to think of it, the Turing machine was an idea that Turing invented to formalize Hilbert's intuitive notion of an effective computation. And I think that idea turned out to have some value.
- pwhelan 16y ago
  "Pure" mathematics sometimes has applications as well - number theory and cryptography, boolean algebra and circuits, etc. I do not think that Adams would argue that pure math is worthless, rather that it has applications that haven't shown how valuable it is or is not. Value is associated with utility as well. If Markov chains didn't help us describe things well, despite it seemingly being difficult to come up with, it would have little value. However, anything that stretches the limits of human understanding has value in that it increases our capacity reason and shows paths that do not bear much fruit.
- outotrai 16y ago
  I'm shooting from the hip here, but I think maybe there's a distinction to be made between ideas for a product and ideas as a product. The end result of the ideas of mathematicians is mathematics itself - furthering mathematics was the goal all along. Obviously ideas count when you're working within the realm of ideas alone. However, when the ideas are a means to an end (e.g., a movie, say), the implementation is what counts. You might have the world's greatest screenplay in your desk, but if you haven't gotten to the execution stage, what kind of movie do you have? (None.) Whereas if you'd started with something, anything, like walking trees fighting hobgoblins, say, or the idea that maybe humans are just batteries for supercomputers in the future, your movie might have a chance, depending on its execution.
alan-crowe 16y ago
I'm not convinced that the idea/execution dichotomy works. Consider the steam engine of Thomas Newcomen. We may say that it was a triumph of execution. The earlier Savery engine failed commercially because it used steam pressure and early boilers and pipe work could not contain it. The idea of using atmospheric pressure to do work and leaving the steam circuit unpressurised was the key idea in the Newcomen or Atmospheric Engine. Since this idea was due to Denis Papin, who failed to exploit it, we may say that the idea was worthless and Thomas Newcomen's success was due to good execution of Papin's idea. Here is a second idea which fills out the rest of this paragraph. In 1712 high pressure steam was one hundred years ahead of its time. Pipes would leak, boilers would burst. Papin's idea of using unpressurised steam, condensing it, and letting atmospheric pressure do the work is obviously stupid, but if you don't want to wait 100 years, it is the only option, so just persevere and make it work. This is idea is the ignition key of the industrial revolution. We cannot ignore it, and yet it sits in the middle of the gray area between /idea/ and /execution/, mocking the dichotomy that Scott Adams blogs about.
jrockway 16y ago
It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters. xkcd has characters. There is hat guy, Megan, Bobby Tables, Randal, and a few others.
- username3 16y ago
  Now it does.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Hat guy first occurred in comic #12, and then became a regular character in comic #29. xkcd is currently at #749.
- bliss 16y ago
  Even the main stick man character is the Author's own voice (or that's how I read it). So that's the most prominent character. His "Dilbert" if you will...
  - bliss 16y ago
    And the mom and the girlfriend and...
jamesbritt 16y ago
"For example, here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic." Hmm, expect that doesn't strike me as an idea for a movie so much as an idea for an idea for a movie. An idea may be worthless if it is little more than a potential trigger word or some vague imagery. It can be valuable if it in turn prompts a better, more substantial idea. It seems that when people say that execution is everything, part of "execution" is to first take a vague, ill-defined, near-meaningless idea and turn it into a well-formed, full-bodied idea.
- philwelch 16y ago
  This is a Hollywood/James Cameron extravaganza--the mediocre love story and CGI are just assumed. "Titanic" is, in fact, the complete and full idea behind that movie. Michael Bay tried the same thing with Pearl Harbor, but his execution was very sub-Cameron. Also, there's nothing romantic about the Japanese bombing a fleet in port. The Titanic is probably the best disaster you could do this with. There's still the Hindenberg, but the target audience for these types of movies would get distracted and confused by all the swastikas. So "Titanic" wasn't that bad an idea after all.
toby 16y ago
This seems like a false dichotomy, yet one that's argued all the time. The actual argument seems to be about the definition of the word "idea". Maybe the word "Titanic" is a bad idea for a movie. It's not even really an idea at all. The actual idea for "Titanic" was a very high-budget, ominous, cross-cultural love story with great special effects set on a famous ship. But at what point are we talking about execution? Execution is itself a series of good ideas to materialize a concept, right? What's certainly true is that "A Dilbert movie" is not a sufficiently developed idea for anyone to say whether it's good or not. Of course, the role of cultural critics is not to elucidate uncertainty but to make strong statements that others will read and argue about.
kunjaan 16y ago
I feel the author did not do a good job in defending the thesis of "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." I do agree that relying on the first aha-moment,however grand it may be, to carry the entire weight of success is a bad investment. Similarly to throw away an insight without analyzing it is equally foolish. Of course, you can never predict if an idea will derive its entire value when thrown and mingled with other external factors. However that doesn't mean that the idea itself plays a small role in the success of any endeavor. Every execution step that the author talks about requires coming up or at least using the so called ideas. You need creative insights in every step of your project. This will require the same amount of diligence in defining the purpose, testing the hypothesis and maybe even jumping that leap of faith. The author needs to clear the distinction between a conceptual idea and the execution of it. Lastly, he has to mention the metric required to judge the success of an idea. Since he envelopes every single Idea into one set, he has to have a parameter to at least attest the value of them. I personally feel ideas as diverse as Darwin's idea of evolution to an entrepreneur's idea of a company to an artist's idea of an art cannot be lumped into one category. I do agree with the author that ideas when defined without any context or in isolation cannot be judged. But none of the arguments that he makes truly discounts the worth of it.
evanjacobs 16y ago
Ideas aren't worthless. Ideas are plentiful. Ideas are made valuable by extraction and refinement of the key elements.
ww8520 16y ago
We should abolish patents.
c0riander 16y ago
Good ideas have more room for error -- you can take a great idea and do good work and still be successful. Bad ideas require greatness; you have to get it just right. I think it's the wiggle room that a good idea affords that people latch onto.
blizkreeg 16y ago
I run into people blinded by the idea fallacy every now and then and I can't but shake my head. They'll tell me, I have this great idea for for you, but you'll have to pay me or give some equity. And all I feel like doing is vigorously shaking them.
Torotopo 16y ago
Is Hamlet an idea? It has certainly been executed famously in a number of different ways. Does a play not exist until it's produced? What's the idea behind the Mona Lisa? Of course, there's that whole sticky wicket of Platonic forms , in which the object (the execution of the idea) is just a flawed imitation of the true idea. (But I hate to sidetrack the thread into a debate over materialism -- although I think the mathematics point was spot on...) Of course, in reality, Scott was probably a little frustrated that some fans were shooting down a movie before they had ANY IDEA whatsoever about it -- and here the rest of us spend our time debating his idea about their lack of an idea. If ideas are worthless, what are ideas about ideas?
smithbits 16y ago
There seems to be a bit of a strawman argument going on here. When people share "their opinions on whether it was a good idea to create a Dilbert movie" there's a fair number of assumptions tied up in there. It sounds the same as the question "Can Hollywood make a successful movie out of the characters created by Scott Adams?" Could the Hollywood studio system of the 1950's have made Easy Rider? No, of course not. Adams makes some interesting and fairly uncontroversial points about execution, but seems to do so on the back of a misunderstanding. There aren't that many movies that Hollywood can make with Dilbert, and most of them aren't worth watching.
chmike 16y ago
I disagree with the author. Ideas are not worthless. It is just that execution has a much bigger impact on the result. Ideas are like seeds. Without seeds you can't get anything. But even with bad seeds one can get a good result with good ground and good caring. And very good seeds can be spoiled. Ideas are thus important, but not as much as execution. Considering them as worthless is wrong.
Tycho 16y ago
I'd say instead that the real value of ideas generally cannot be known/calculated until executed. They are somewhat like prophecies. Only a good track record will get people listening and willing to pay 'in advance.' In the meantime your only hope is to capitalize on the idea yourself (and if you're planning to do so, the potential value of the idea merits some considerations of secrecy).
NewWorldOrder 16y ago
Personally, I can't stand when people claim ideas are worthless and execution is everything. The fact is that ideas INFORM flawless execution. Ideas and execution are inextricably linked.

285 points by alexandros 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

A lot of first-time entrepreneurs (me included) make the mistake of believing that the right idea is paramount for success. As Adams points out that's not true. It's getting old but it's still the truth: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything

ilcesco 16y ago
I might be a rampant first-time entrepreneur wannabe, but I still believe ideas have a little value. I'd rather say: Bad ideas are worthless, great execution makes the difference.

m0th87 16y ago

Seems like an over-simplification to me. An idea without execution is worthless. But execution without an idea is pretty worthless too. Even if I mastered execution, I couldn't sell a product that costs you $100 and punched you in the face every time you used it, because it's a shitty idea.

philk 16y ago
Of course you could. The target market would be masochists and they spend money on those kind of products/services already.
philwelch 16y ago
Gifts for people you don't like?
osipov 16y ago
Agree. Different ideas have different execution and value potential: for example an idea to dig a cubic foot hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere has a different potential than an idea about how to solve the financial crisis.
bdotdub 16y ago
This reminds me of this post from Derek Sivers: http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply
moron4hire 16y ago
boxing trainer, boom. I tried to come up with one myself (shitty idea) and thought I had one with "beer that tastes like urine", but then I realized that such a product could conceivably find a market with alcoholics trying to condition themselves against drinking. So yes, even Miller and Coors still have a market (sorry, home-brewer joke).
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "I tried to think of a shitty idea with no potential market, and came up with 'beer that tastes like urine.' Then I realized Miller and Coors beat me to it." (trying to show the importance of the execution of an idea)
  - moron4hire 16y ago
    Okay, how about clothing that melts away when it gets wet? Got anything there?
    - Xurinos 16y ago
      Sounds like something you would go to your local "sensual items" shop for, and given Rule 34, it likely already exists. Certainly some candied versions do.
    - ajdecon 16y ago
      If it's a lot cheaper than regular clothes, make it fashionable/slutty and call it disposable club-wear.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
subbu 16y ago
Only if master executors were dumbos. As someone pointed out above, good executors fix mediocre ideas.

philk 16y ago

This is a fantastic post by Scott. I think the great idea fallacy continues because it appeals to people's fantasy of becoming successful without much work. Anyone can imagine themselves having a great idea and then being successful. It's a lot harder (and less pleasant) to imagine taking an unremarkable idea and spending years of hard work to make it succeed.

jimbokun 16y ago
The whole concept of the "great idea" is skewered brilliantly by the Windows 7 ads. We all get a good chuckle watching someone tell us straight faced that, just because they thought of something that could have been better about Windows, they can now take credit for it after Microsoft successfully implemented it in Windows 7. Could be useful as a reference the next time someone has a business idea that he "just needs a tech guy to implement."
- grinich 16y ago
  It looks like their agency is still Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. For reference, here's some of their other work: Laptop Hunters - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU Gates/Seinfeld - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE3XiAxDjA&feature=relat... Good News (Kylie) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOq02DTTMU Seems like a strange way to advertise.
  - aditya 16y ago
    CP+B also did the famous (and awesome) Burger King Get a Whopper for defriending friends campaign.
    - grinich 16y ago
      I just saw that they also did the BK Freakout, where they pretend the Whopper is discontinued and watch people go nuts. Talk about customer loyalty. http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/whopper-freakout.html http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/whopper-freakout.html

Sukotto 16y ago

You'd be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn't succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn't fail if the execution were left to morons. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Words to live by. I often have to re-evaluate my own thinking because I tend to fall into the trap of waiting for a better idea.

billswift 16y ago
Theodore Rubin, in "Overcoming Indecisiveness" wrote: "The Big Fact is this: In very few instances is one decision actually better than another. "In the majority of issues, almost any choice can be converted into a constructive decision." His point is not to waste time and energy dithering - it is the commitment to making a decision work that is most important. Just substitute "idea" for "choice".

CapitalistCartr 16y ago

An idea that's the right goal or vision for me probably wont be the right one for you. What makes an idea good for me is who I am. Pursuing a great idea for making a better stove is probably not the right goal for me. But it was for Fred Carl, who founded Viking Range. Dreams, visions, goals are specific to the right people.

timf 16y ago

Saying ideas are "worthless" is a hyperbolic way to put things. Why can't people say "an idea's relative importance is not as big as many people think." I think Derek Sivers puts it nicely, it is a multiplier (but yes you need to execute in the first place): http://sivers.org/multiply http://sivers.org/multiply

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mrvir 16y ago
Yes, provocative illustration, but very entertaining, I admit. The magic trick was to reduce every idea to one word or one sentence. Can be used to make any movie plot sound weird.

mad44 16y ago

"Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." I don't agree with the first part. Are you guys suggesting execution is mechanical? A good execution requires a lot of ingenuity and creativity and taste. So there again, good ideas are crucial.

jimbokun 16y ago
Perhaps the correct phrasing is "Ideas without execution are worthless." Ingenuity, creativity, and taste locked up in your own head and not executed are worth nothing to the world around you.

Gormo 16y ago

I'm reminded of the common argument that some proposed solution "works in theory", if only the practice could be sorted out. But the concept of things working or not working in theory is meaningless - whether something works or not is inherently a question of practice. Outside of execution, there is no way to assign value to a theoretical model.

arethuza 16y ago

A slight nitpick: Hogan's Heroes was about a prison camp for Allied POWs - not a concentration camp.

mynameishere 16y ago
http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108January1967Page8Medium.gif http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/magazineMad108Janu...

zachbeane 16y ago

Reminds me of Ed Catmull's talk about Pixar management at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc#t=21m50s 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."

ccc3 16y ago

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.

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jasonlotito 16y ago
None of your examples detracts from what he is saying. Your suggestion comes down to level of success. Your examples only work if Henry Ford would be considered a failure if painted rocks didn't lead to as much success as cars did, despite the evidence that rocks, painted and unpainted, are still a market.
- ccc3 16y ago
  He concludes his post by saying: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. The only way that's true is if you consider success to be binary. Either you succeed or you fail. But level of success is important in terms of economic value and it is demonstrable that the idea is a factor in level of success.

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statictype 16y ago

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.

pigbucket 16y ago
Scott could be a Supergeek for all I know, but XKCD is typically aimed at the lower rungs of the geek ladder. Even so I think it comes up with brilliant ideas all the time, and succeeds despite the relatively mediocre execution. (You have to use the words 'idea' and 'execution' differently from Scott to see it that way, but that's part of the problem with an ill-defined opposition like idea/execution)

ajscherer 16y ago

"You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is." This is ridiculous. Does he honestly believe that a movie about me eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about Batman? Why do some movies get made and others not if it is meaningless talk about the worth of an idea? Are studio executives using some random process to determine which movies get made? Do they have no idea what a movie or an idea is? Clearly it is meaningful to talk about the quality of ideas, and right now there is nothing else to talk about with regard to a Dilbert movie. He has a valid point that the quality of the idea is a marginal factor in the success of any endeavor, but he generalizes it to the point of absurdity when he claims you can't discuss the quality of an idea. This sort of careless generalization seems typical of his blog posts that make it to hn, but I suppose thats why he is drawing cartoons and not proving theorems.

jasonlotito 16y ago
"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?
- ajscherer 16y ago
  "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." This is exactly what I meant when I said that the quality of an idea is a marginal factor in the success of an endeavor. I fully agree that execution should be the main focus. What I was trying to say is that not all ideas are equal. You can always make a worse movie with a better idea, or vice versa, but some ideas are easier to pull off than others. Given the exact same level of execution, "Batman fights the Joker" will beat "Random nobody in Nebraska sits in the dark eating cereal" every single time. If all ideas are of equal quality, why would Hogan's Heroes be an excellent example? Wouldn't all examples then be equally good or bad? Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example precisely because the idea is harder to pull off than other ideas. If you gave Hogan's Heroes and American Idol each to 100 teams to turn into a show, I believe American Idol would become a hit with greater frequency than Hogan's Heroes.

JabavuAdams 16y ago

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.

mynameishere 16y ago

Here's the world's worst opinion on movie making: here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic. Can anybody name even a single, solitary reason--even one--why the story of the Titanic could be considered anything other than a fantastic idea for a movie? The only thing I can come up with is "It's been done (successfully) too many times already", but that actually disproves the general assertion. I mean--it's up there with WWII and James Bond as far as great movie ideas go, and yet, he says "worst"? Bizarre.

jdlegg 16y ago
Show business, being primarily driven by the profit motive, tends to focus on ideas to which an audience can relate and enjoy. The story of the RMS Titanic, being one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, is generally antagonistic toward these ends because most (not all) people don't like thinking about the possibility of dying on an ocean-liner and do not enjoy watching it happen to others. It should be clear how these two are in opposition. For this reason alone, conventional thinking would call a movie about the Titanic a "bad idea." The movie worked, though, and made a billion dollars because the director executed it in such a way that it actually wasn't about a sinking ship and people drowning, it was about something else. And this other thing (call it the human spirit or what-have-you), overcomes the tragedy of the situation to make it something the movie-going audience could relate to and enjoy. From a more technical perspective, the Titanic story could be considered a "bad idea" because, on the surface, the plot should hold no surprises to anyone: boat sets sail, boat hits iceberg, boat sinks, passengers are drowned. The remarkable thing about the Titanic film is that EVERYONE knows how it's going to end, even before they sit down to watch it. This, according to conventional wisdom, would be a bad idea as far as show business is concerned. Who wants to see a movie like that? Yet audiences returned to theaters multiple times. It is a credit to Cameron's direction that the film could overcome such a large, inherent obstacle in the Titanic storyline.
- deleted 16y ago
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- mynameishere 16y ago

seanlinmt 16y ago

"The value of an idea lies in its execution"

iworkforthem 16y ago
Spot on! Whether it make or break an idea lie with the ability of the entrepreneur and its team.

jfornear 16y ago

The "execution is everything" mantra is tired hyperbole. Of course 'the idea' is worthless if it's nothing.

subbu 16y ago
That's the whole point of the article. He is saying that in the context of an idea.

lukev 16y ago

Some ideas are easier to execute than others. It is certainly possible to create an award-winning movie about two gay cowboys, but I bet there are far fewer writers/directors who could pull it off than those who could produce yet another successful romantic comedy. So if your one goal is to make a successful movie, your chances of success are probably better if you choose to do a romantic comedy rather than a movie about two gay cowboys. Unless, of course, you are confident in your ability to make an amazing gay cowboy movie, in which case you should do it. In other words, execution is everything, but that doesn't mean you should ignore ideas when deciding what to do.

michael_nielsen 16y ago

What a curious post. Pure mathematics is nothing but ideas - often very deep ones that very few people are capable of originating. If you take Adams literally, then mathematics is worthless. Is the idea of the Ricci flow, which Perelman used to prove the Poincare conjecture, really useless? The problem Adams is addressing, so far as I can see, is that many people think trivial, easy-to-have ideas are somehow valuable. Of course, that's false, as Adams says. Value is associated to scarcity. Easy-to-have ideas aren't valuable, simply because they're not scarce. An idea like the Ricci flow is valuable, because very few people are capable of having it. Ditto the ideas behind deep algorithms. PageRank had value in large part because relatively few people had the depth of insight required to come up with it. Come to think of it, the Turing machine was an idea that Turing invented to formalize Hilbert's intuitive notion of an effective computation. And I think that idea turned out to have some value.

pwhelan 16y ago
"Pure" mathematics sometimes has applications as well - number theory and cryptography, boolean algebra and circuits, etc. I do not think that Adams would argue that pure math is worthless, rather that it has applications that haven't shown how valuable it is or is not. Value is associated with utility as well. If Markov chains didn't help us describe things well, despite it seemingly being difficult to come up with, it would have little value. However, anything that stretches the limits of human understanding has value in that it increases our capacity reason and shows paths that do not bear much fruit.
outotrai 16y ago
I'm shooting from the hip here, but I think maybe there's a distinction to be made between ideas for a product and ideas as a product. The end result of the ideas of mathematicians is mathematics itself - furthering mathematics was the goal all along. Obviously ideas count when you're working within the realm of ideas alone. However, when the ideas are a means to an end (e.g., a movie, say), the implementation is what counts. You might have the world's greatest screenplay in your desk, but if you haven't gotten to the execution stage, what kind of movie do you have? (None.) Whereas if you'd started with something, anything, like walking trees fighting hobgoblins, say, or the idea that maybe humans are just batteries for supercomputers in the future, your movie might have a chance, depending on its execution.

alan-crowe 16y ago

I'm not convinced that the idea/execution dichotomy works. Consider the steam engine of Thomas Newcomen. We may say that it was a triumph of execution. The earlier Savery engine failed commercially because it used steam pressure and early boilers and pipe work could not contain it. The idea of using atmospheric pressure to do work and leaving the steam circuit unpressurised was the key idea in the Newcomen or Atmospheric Engine. Since this idea was due to Denis Papin, who failed to exploit it, we may say that the idea was worthless and Thomas Newcomen's success was due to good execution of Papin's idea. Here is a second idea which fills out the rest of this paragraph. In 1712 high pressure steam was one hundred years ahead of its time. Pipes would leak, boilers would burst. Papin's idea of using unpressurised steam, condensing it, and letting atmospheric pressure do the work is obviously stupid, but if you don't want to wait 100 years, it is the only option, so just persevere and make it work. This is idea is the ignition key of the industrial revolution. We cannot ignore it, and yet it sits in the middle of the gray area between /idea/ and /execution/, mocking the dichotomy that Scott Adams blogs about.

jrockway 16y ago

It will be called XKCD and have no discernable characters. xkcd has characters. There is hat guy, Megan, Bobby Tables, Randal, and a few others.

username3 16y ago
Now it does.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Hat guy first occurred in comic #12, and then became a regular character in comic #29. xkcd is currently at #749.
bliss 16y ago
Even the main stick man character is the Author's own voice (or that's how I read it). So that's the most prominent character. His "Dilbert" if you will...
- bliss 16y ago
  And the mom and the girlfriend and...

jamesbritt 16y ago

"For example, here's the world's worst idea for a movie: Titanic." Hmm, expect that doesn't strike me as an idea for a movie so much as an idea for an idea for a movie. An idea may be worthless if it is little more than a potential trigger word or some vague imagery. It can be valuable if it in turn prompts a better, more substantial idea. It seems that when people say that execution is everything, part of "execution" is to first take a vague, ill-defined, near-meaningless idea and turn it into a well-formed, full-bodied idea.

philwelch 16y ago
This is a Hollywood/James Cameron extravaganza--the mediocre love story and CGI are just assumed. "Titanic" is, in fact, the complete and full idea behind that movie. Michael Bay tried the same thing with Pearl Harbor, but his execution was very sub-Cameron. Also, there's nothing romantic about the Japanese bombing a fleet in port. The Titanic is probably the best disaster you could do this with. There's still the Hindenberg, but the target audience for these types of movies would get distracted and confused by all the swastikas. So "Titanic" wasn't that bad an idea after all.

toby 16y ago

This seems like a false dichotomy, yet one that's argued all the time. The actual argument seems to be about the definition of the word "idea". Maybe the word "Titanic" is a bad idea for a movie. It's not even really an idea at all. The actual idea for "Titanic" was a very high-budget, ominous, cross-cultural love story with great special effects set on a famous ship. But at what point are we talking about execution? Execution is itself a series of good ideas to materialize a concept, right? What's certainly true is that "A Dilbert movie" is not a sufficiently developed idea for anyone to say whether it's good or not. Of course, the role of cultural critics is not to elucidate uncertainty but to make strong statements that others will read and argue about.

kunjaan 16y ago

I feel the author did not do a good job in defending the thesis of "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." I do agree that relying on the first aha-moment,however grand it may be, to carry the entire weight of success is a bad investment. Similarly to throw away an insight without analyzing it is equally foolish. Of course, you can never predict if an idea will derive its entire value when thrown and mingled with other external factors. However that doesn't mean that the idea itself plays a small role in the success of any endeavor. Every execution step that the author talks about requires coming up or at least using the so called ideas. You need creative insights in every step of your project. This will require the same amount of diligence in defining the purpose, testing the hypothesis and maybe even jumping that leap of faith. The author needs to clear the distinction between a conceptual idea and the execution of it. Lastly, he has to mention the metric required to judge the success of an idea. Since he envelopes every single Idea into one set, he has to have a parameter to at least attest the value of them. I personally feel ideas as diverse as Darwin's idea of evolution to an entrepreneur's idea of a company to an artist's idea of an art cannot be lumped into one category. I do agree with the author that ideas when defined without any context or in isolation cannot be judged. But none of the arguments that he makes truly discounts the worth of it.

evanjacobs 16y ago

Ideas aren't worthless. Ideas are plentiful. Ideas are made valuable by extraction and refinement of the key elements.

ww8520 16y ago

We should abolish patents.

c0riander 16y ago

Good ideas have more room for error -- you can take a great idea and do good work and still be successful. Bad ideas require greatness; you have to get it just right. I think it's the wiggle room that a good idea affords that people latch onto.

blizkreeg 16y ago

I run into people blinded by the idea fallacy every now and then and I can't but shake my head. They'll tell me, I have this great idea for for you, but you'll have to pay me or give some equity. And all I feel like doing is vigorously shaking them.

Torotopo 16y ago

Is Hamlet an idea? It has certainly been executed famously in a number of different ways. Does a play not exist until it's produced? What's the idea behind the Mona Lisa? Of course, there's that whole sticky wicket of Platonic forms , in which the object (the execution of the idea) is just a flawed imitation of the true idea. (But I hate to sidetrack the thread into a debate over materialism -- although I think the mathematics point was spot on...) Of course, in reality, Scott was probably a little frustrated that some fans were shooting down a movie before they had ANY IDEA whatsoever about it -- and here the rest of us spend our time debating his idea about their lack of an idea. If ideas are worthless, what are ideas about ideas?

smithbits 16y ago

There seems to be a bit of a strawman argument going on here. When people share "their opinions on whether it was a good idea to create a Dilbert movie" there's a fair number of assumptions tied up in there. It sounds the same as the question "Can Hollywood make a successful movie out of the characters created by Scott Adams?" Could the Hollywood studio system of the 1950's have made Easy Rider? No, of course not. Adams makes some interesting and fairly uncontroversial points about execution, but seems to do so on the back of a misunderstanding. There aren't that many movies that Hollywood can make with Dilbert, and most of them aren't worth watching.

chmike 16y ago

I disagree with the author. Ideas are not worthless. It is just that execution has a much bigger impact on the result. Ideas are like seeds. Without seeds you can't get anything. But even with bad seeds one can get a good result with good ground and good caring. And very good seeds can be spoiled. Ideas are thus important, but not as much as execution. Considering them as worthless is wrong.

Tycho 16y ago

I'd say instead that the real value of ideas generally cannot be known/calculated until executed. They are somewhat like prophecies. Only a good track record will get people listening and willing to pay 'in advance.' In the meantime your only hope is to capitalize on the idea yourself (and if you're planning to do so, the potential value of the idea merits some considerations of secrecy).

NewWorldOrder 16y ago

Personally, I can't stand when people claim ideas are worthless and execution is everything. The fact is that ideas INFORM flawless execution. Ideas and execution are inextricably linked.