

Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters - klous
http://www.inc.com/rob-adams/2010/06/ideas-commodity-but-execution-intelligence-matters.html

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Retric
You often hear this but it's completely wrong.

Intelligence and Execution was not going to save Pet's.com or all those other
.COM's based on stupid idea. If anything assuming Execution is what's
important is a great way to separate a sucker err Investor from his money.

PS: A good idea is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for success.
Shipping CO2 to Mars is not going to make you money end of story.

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rmah
A minor clarification: there was nothing stupid, per se, about selling pet
related products online. It was their execution that was horribly flawed.
Others have executed on the "sell pet stuff online" idea and succeed to one
degree or another.

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Retric
Why limit yourself to selling "pet stuff" online?

Edit: There are advantages and disadvantages to selling Pet stuff online.
(Bad: tends to be low value per weight and vary fragmented dogs, cats, fish,
birds. aka Dry fish food is reasonable to FedEx 50lb bags of dog food less so.
Good: Large market and ???) Clearly you can make money selling pet stuff
online but there is little reason to do that over selling kitchen supply's
online.

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MicahWedemeyer
Be excellent at 1 thing. Trying to be all things to all people is a great
recipe for failure.

If you love pets and have great connections in that community, it's a crap-ton
easier to build a "pet stuff" store than a "everything under the sun" store.

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michael_dorfman
But that doesn't mean that there's a market for the "pet stuff" store,
necessarily.

In other words: Be excellent and one thing, but make sure that one thing is
worth being excellent at.

Trying to be all things to all people is a great recipe for failure, but it's
not the only recipe for failure. There are lots and lots of ways to fail.

~~~
Gormo
I think most of the big successes that came out of the dotcom era were the
ones that applied internet technologies to enhance markets that already
existed.

Amazon worked; bookstores are a very viable market. Ebay worked; flea markets
are common in every town. PayPal worked; everyone has a checking account.

There are also plenty of pet stores. Pets.com could have easily been a success
if they had built their company properly.

What you're saying seems to validate the article's point: execute a proven
"commodity" idea well, and you can succeed. Bet the company on an experimental
vision, and you risk failure.

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contextfree
I find that the hard thing, at least for me, is coming up with a good idea
that's also practically implementable under the particular constraints and
context you happen to be in. I can come up with plenty of ideas that might be
good in some context other than mine, and plenty of boring ideas that work in
my context, but the combination of both is elusive. That's why I'm still
working for other people and haven't tried to go into business for myself.

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Gormo
Concisely: you are more likely to succeed if you try to build a mousetrap
better than if you try to build a better mousetrap.

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arman0
Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. So, you do need to worry about who you
disclose your ideas to.

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moultano
There's a much better way to say this that isn't controversial or link-bait.
It's also very old.

"The devil is in the details."

~~~
Gormo
That's really the contrapositive, though. That proverb says that "not
understanding the details will lead to failure", but the article is saying
"master the details if you want to win".

Different set of connotations. We want to find success, not Satan, in the
specifics.

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astartup1
This is completely wrong for some obvious reasons

1\. If ideas meant nothing there would be no patent and trade secrets.

2\. Big companies are very good at execution but start-up still can compete
against them. Most of the times because big companies don't have or don't
value ideas that start-ups adopt.

3\. Most people making this argument haven't had any great ideas themselves.
"Ad hominem" attack but people need to reflect and make up articles.

4\. Author is referring to iterating on initial idea as execution. I think,
that is also part of creating idea not exactly execution.

Seed however small holds everything to generate a large tree. What is
important? Soil and water or seed...

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Tycho
And what is execution but a series of related, more specific ideas? (plus
capital)

~~~
bena
Work. The difference is work or effort.

It doesn't matter if you have 50 excellent ideas each day, you are going to be
outclassed by the guy who has one mediocre idea that he executes relentlessly.

Because that is the one quality that separates the successful from the
unsuccessful: tenacity or perseverance. No matter what, you keep trying.
Failure isn't a showstopper, just an indication that you need to modify your
strategy. Keep plugging away at it and you to can find yourself with an
overnight success after 10 years.

~~~
Tycho
Work is just another form of capital, even if it's your own. I mean consider
one person has an idea for a product, and they sketch out their requirements
then employ engineers to build accordingly. Let's say another person has an
idea then with their own skills builds a more successful product. Was the
second person more successful because they worked harder than the first - no,
because they didn't necessarily work any harder than the engineers that were
commissioned. The difference, however, could be that along the way the solo
worker came up with many additional ideas which he could then add to the
project.

I agree with the notion that one great idea ALONE does not guarantee success.
But that's different from saying ideas are worthless.

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jackfoxy
The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the
software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious
software patents dealing with non-trivial algorithms like compression,
encryption, etc.).

So many software and business process patents would have been thought of by so
many different people, it only faced with the situation. So in that sense I
think, yes, many, many ideas are really commodities. Where ideas are not
commodities are, for instance, breakthroughs in logic like Haskell Curry or
Kurt Goedel made.

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dustingram
A similar post by Scott Adams 2 weeks prior:

<http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_value_of_ideas/>

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Tichy
"through a management team with superior execution intelligence"

Isn't that just a more fancy way of saying "a management team with ideas"?

