Don’t Be The First!
I often find myself thinking about innovation, ideas, and entrepreneurship, where everybody seems on the quest of whatever they can claim being the first in it. Being the first doesn’t mean to be remarkable. Let’s think about it: Google wasn’t the first search engine outhere when they laucnhed, and when they started there were allready big players out there with much more money in their pockets, like for example Altavista. So being the first may be of value until someone else enter the same market, but at this point is execution that matters, and it matters much more then the idea itself.
So Ideas are worth nothing, execution does!
A lot of talks go around the ConnectU vs Facebook controversy where a lawsuit is claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for the website from former college room-mates. Let’s assume that the lawsuit is right, let’s even assume that both projects started not just from the same idea but even from the same codebase, well then you see how execution is important for the success of a project more then the idea behind it, so recognition should go to execution more then to ideas .
If you try to concnetrate on the good execution of “something”, instead of putting your resources into NDAs and other ways to protect just an idea, the chances of success are just much more highers. An idea is something too vague, too immaterial. Let’s face it, all the great companies, brands, products and services out there are all born thanks to beautiful executions in some problem solving excercises, more then around just beautiful ideas.
Another example: the iPhone. The iPhone is, well, a cellphone, not the first cellphone out there, not the first or only touch screen enabled one, not the first that can install and run applications…the iPhone is just one among the hundreds of thousand of cellphone models available on the market. So the idea for sure is not the value and reason behind its success, again execution is. Apple in fact wasn’t the First, but it was the One!
This is my simple thought about today’s world, about ideas and about execution: If we think of execution as a matter of problem solving think of math problems, you can have many ways to solve a problem, and all of them may lead to the same final correct solution, but execution is much more then just that, execution is about solving those problem in the most elegant, simple and beautiful way.
