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I am of the opinion that "ideas are nothing, execution is everything" grows in part out of the lack of adequate language and mental models to distinguish amongs

I am of the opinion that "ideas are nothing, execution is everything" grows in part out of the lack of adequate language and mental models to distinguish amongst ideas of the armchair politician variety and ideas with legs. There are some words to distinguish such things, like hypothesis and theorem, but they mostly don't apply in the realm of business. I have been trying to sort out how to do a post on that very topic but I am not ready for it.

wlievens 13y ago
True indeed. Some ideas are really valuable, and I think it's mainly those that are well-informed, committed to a specific market (typically a niche) and ripe for execution. Maybe it's because many of the ideas in the "ideas are nothing" category are twitbook/fourit/squaresnap/flickchat/... clones, rather than ideas like "let's build a product for market X using tech Y to reduce problem Z".
- DorintheFlora 13y ago
  I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you pay close attention to behavior, you can infer what people really think, on a deeper level than what they admit to. We have concepts for that in spiritual and psychological realms but not really in the realm of business. We have ideas like karma and Akashic records and the subconscious and Freudian slips. In crime/law (police, courts), we have ideas concerning motive and intent. We don't have ideas like that in business, at least not in a well developed, formal fashion. I think those deeper patterns determine whether an idea has legs or not and it is those deeper patterns we need to figure out how to talk about, how to mentally model, etc. Those patterns are the ones that are not armchair politician style pontification but we don't really have a formal framework for examining ideas deeply and thoroughly for business purposes. (Edit: In some ways we do have such a framework. For example, I am sure that venture capitalists have a lot of paradigms for doing just that. But this meme of "ideas do not matter" still persists and is oft repeated by venture capitalists themselves.)
  - Futurebot 13y ago
    We do have a word for that in econ/business: revealed preference. In the business world and the ones you mentioned, however, it's not always a reliable indicator; people routinely do things they do not want to do due to loyalty, face saving, fear, coercion, group pressure, and a pile of other things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
Noxchi 13y ago
I think it should be rephrased "Ideas are nothing without execution".
jorleif 13y ago
That is very well put. I am often amazed what a big difference certain ideas make it possible to build complex things quickly and with low amounts of bugs. For example building a parsing subsystem "properly" as taught on compiler courses vs haphazard combination of regexps. It is mentally much more demanding, and requires more effort up front, but then to your surprise, every change you make just works almost immediately, and there are no hairy corner cases to resolve (this is kind of declarative vs imperative, but not quite). Another example is mathematical models, such as Markov Models and the like, where you can have a really complex behavior, but your parameters are simply matrices and all operations are some sort of matrix algebra. Difficult to understand at first, but very powerful and "clean" once you do. In contrast, as you say, there are huge amounts of armchair ideas that are not worth very much even if they are correct. For example "software will eat everything" is something I believe is mostly right. It is also a business idea with direct implications for action. Despite this, it is only valuable to set the general direction (let's do software), but not any specific cases. It does not mean that every case of transforming a traditional business into a software one is going to be a grand success, or even profitable. In fact, these types of ideas have a tendency to cause one to forget the exceptions from the rule, and thereby being actively harmful.
- DorintheFlora 13y ago
  Thanks to everyone who replied (or upvoted me). FYI, I am going to try to start exploring these ideas here: http://dorintheflora.blogspot.com/ http://dorintheflora.blogspot.com/

wlievens 13y ago

True indeed. Some ideas are really valuable, and I think it's mainly those that are well-informed, committed to a specific market (typically a niche) and ripe for execution. Maybe it's because many of the ideas in the "ideas are nothing" category are twitbook/fourit/squaresnap/flickchat/... clones, rather than ideas like "let's build a product for market X using tech Y to reduce problem Z".

DorintheFlora 13y ago
I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you pay close attention to behavior, you can infer what people really think, on a deeper level than what they admit to. We have concepts for that in spiritual and psychological realms but not really in the realm of business. We have ideas like karma and Akashic records and the subconscious and Freudian slips. In crime/law (police, courts), we have ideas concerning motive and intent. We don't have ideas like that in business, at least not in a well developed, formal fashion. I think those deeper patterns determine whether an idea has legs or not and it is those deeper patterns we need to figure out how to talk about, how to mentally model, etc. Those patterns are the ones that are not armchair politician style pontification but we don't really have a formal framework for examining ideas deeply and thoroughly for business purposes. (Edit: In some ways we do have such a framework. For example, I am sure that venture capitalists have a lot of paradigms for doing just that. But this meme of "ideas do not matter" still persists and is oft repeated by venture capitalists themselves.)
- Futurebot 13y ago
  We do have a word for that in econ/business: revealed preference. In the business world and the ones you mentioned, however, it's not always a reliable indicator; people routinely do things they do not want to do due to loyalty, face saving, fear, coercion, group pressure, and a pile of other things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

Noxchi 13y ago

I think it should be rephrased "Ideas are nothing without execution".

jorleif 13y ago

That is very well put. I am often amazed what a big difference certain ideas make it possible to build complex things quickly and with low amounts of bugs. For example building a parsing subsystem "properly" as taught on compiler courses vs haphazard combination of regexps. It is mentally much more demanding, and requires more effort up front, but then to your surprise, every change you make just works almost immediately, and there are no hairy corner cases to resolve (this is kind of declarative vs imperative, but not quite). Another example is mathematical models, such as Markov Models and the like, where you can have a really complex behavior, but your parameters are simply matrices and all operations are some sort of matrix algebra. Difficult to understand at first, but very powerful and "clean" once you do. In contrast, as you say, there are huge amounts of armchair ideas that are not worth very much even if they are correct. For example "software will eat everything" is something I believe is mostly right. It is also a business idea with direct implications for action. Despite this, it is only valuable to set the general direction (let's do software), but not any specific cases. It does not mean that every case of transforming a traditional business into a software one is going to be a grand success, or even profitable. In fact, these types of ideas have a tendency to cause one to forget the exceptions from the rule, and thereby being actively harmful.

DorintheFlora 13y ago
Thanks to everyone who replied (or upvoted me). FYI, I am going to try to start exploring these ideas here: http://dorintheflora.blogspot.com/ http://dorintheflora.blogspot.com/