A fine line between being an ideas woman/man and having an inability to focus
There is a VERY fine line between someone who can spew out the most brilliant ideas and someone who lacks focus and operational skills. Many entrepreneurial organizations fall victim to the latter. This A.D.D.- like trait can really be a challenge to work with when trying to drive a business forward.
Let’s emphasize here that ideas men/women are absolutely essential to have within an organization. If you don’t have someone or a group of people to really drive this role – you are running a serious risk of quickly getting buried under competitive players. However, while great ideas can help position your company as “innovative”, “cool” and people may see you as a great resource to turn to for information and insight, ideas can only take your business so far.
And so what do you do when you have a whole bucket of great ideas? Pick a few that are in-line with your overarching business strategy and then F-O-C-U-S on following ALL the way through to the very end: you don’t want to be left with anything that is half done.
On a general note, business successes are certainly not the result of solely a great idea – I can pretty much guarantee that even your core business idea once existed from someone else years ago – perhaps, even decades back. Just think to yourself how many times a great business emerged where you thought to yourself “CRAP! I thought about that idea years ago!” Well, case and point: business related ideas are just ideas until someone with business strategy, operations and management skills scoops it up and flips it.
My main take away point is to make sure that you are maintaining a balance of a constant inflow of innovation and experimentation while ensuring that those that are taken to full implementation make sense for your business on the high level. Most of the time these two roles, 1) the creative idea generator and 2) the business and operations strategist aka. make stuff happen engines are not successfully lead up by the same person or people – which is O.K. Just make sure you invest in having strong ammo behind both – in one way or another.
Thoughts? As always, I’d love to hear them.
Love this post. I find myself in situations often where I feel like “Debbie Downer” for idea folks. I love ideas people and have a great amount of them myself but when I hear an idea I automatically jump strategizing how to execute said idea. More than not I find fun and cool ideas just can’t effectively be executed. Their is usually a lack or resources, budget and/or time – I find that extremely hard for idea people to come to terms with.
The best ideas out there are the ones that are executed well – the rest are just…thoughts really.
Thanks for reading, Lucia. I really appreciate it.
I definitely am with you on the Debbie Downer thing. I am always THAT woman but here’s the way I see it: what the so called “Debbie Downer” role does is save everybody’s time and resources and only letting the ideas that are viable ones pass through to invest in. It IS however actually “Debbie Downing” if one challenges and questions without providing or encouraging solutions/advice/insights. Instead of shutting down ideas point blank, allow people to understand why it isn’t a viable one for the business.
Challenge and due diligence the heck out of ideas that come forth factoring in resources, execution strategy and what the end result will do for the business.
I really like how you put it: “The best ideas out there are the ones that are executed well – the rest are just…thoughts really.”
Great Post. On that note, I really should get back to work…
Hah. ;) Thanks for reading, Khalid.