Why Ideas Without Execution Are Not Worthless

It's been said that “Ideas without execution are worthless.”

I actually don't believe that I don't believe that ideas without execution are worthless anymore that I believe that children are worthless until they become grown productive members of society who can add value to the economy, right?

That's ridiculous.

But in the entrepreneurial community and in the motivational speaker circuit, there is oftentimes a denigration of ideas and I get it because there's a lot of people out there with great ideas, they're a dime a dozen and they never execute them.

So the ideas end up just dying with a person who had the idea.

However, ideas are powerful. Ideas spread. Like a living thing; sometimes like a weed that you don't even need to water it. It just gets in your head. You can't get it out and truly, ideas are what every single thing in our lives, in our business, is built from.

Every entrepreneur out there started with an idea and although yes, they executed it.

Ideas by themselves are not worthless even without execution and I'll prove that.

But first of all, ideas just like children need to be nurtured with structure with discipline with love in order to grow into the fully realized businesses or visions that they could be… and it doesn't even have to be by us.

In fact if we take an idea and we really get into it and we molded into something that is executable, that idea can be executed by somebody else.

For instance. It can be licensed to somebody else. It can be sold to somebody else. And in that case, I may not have executed anything somebody else did.

But did that make it worthless to me if somebody buys or licenses my idea, they don't do anything with it, but I received the value?

Is that worthless?

I don't think so going back to the way that ideas can really come to fruition. I think that there is a structure.

I know this is a structure that I bring when I work with clients in order to not just create more ideas because realistically the last thing we need is more ideas.

We need better, bigger, breakthrough ideas ideas that create momentum and and outcomes while reducing the complexity and adding simplicity.

And there is a method to do this.

Here's how we're going to take an idea into an Innovative solution.

So whenever one of my clients hires me to do an Ideation Innovation Workshop, whether it's for a big Corporation or a small entrepreneur, the very first thing we do is examine what the problem we're trying to solve is because ideas without trying to solve a problem are.

Lot less effective and a lot of people just like to start with ideas and brainstorm but brainstorming is also an process by which if you just throw ideas at the wall, it's not going to be nearly as effective as if you have a structured brainstorming session.

I refer to the structured brainstorming session that I employ as Disney Dreamstorming because it's based on a three-part strategy that Walt Disney himself used whenever he was planning out all of the various projects.

Basically, Walt Disney brainstormed by separating out the dreamer from the planner from the critic.

The very first thing we do and we sit down to create these innovative solutions is number one, identify the problem number to understand the framework by which we will Dreamstorm and it come up with a plan and only then critiquing of the plan in order to make sure that we don't hit any obstacles.

And nubmer 2, we come up with all of the possible ideas and then we try to determine which of those are the most probable of getting the impact we want with confidence and ease.

We then rank these in a way that makes sense so that we can come up with an executable plan.

Lastly, we utilize many different mental models and what I call cognitive keys to find the shortcuts that decision hacks to make the process go even smoother.

I've talked about cognitive Keys before. In a nutshell these are mental models, principles, rules of thumb and decision hacks that each one of us have fashioned from experience and wisdom.

They are tools that I asked questions that create answers that we might not have seen if we weren't looking at it through this lateral lens know personally.

I always like to look for leverage and this is found by finding ways to do as little effort as possible and still get the same result right there.

A lot of entrepreneurs, myself included until I discovered this, just love to be in momentum and we start something before it's fully flushed out with a plan that covers the all the necessary components because we think we'll just figure it out when problems arise.

But that's not always the best plan.

If you are watching this and you are thinking that you've got a lot of ideas and they're worthless until you execute them, that might not be true because if you execute an idea that is not well thought out through structure and discipline and a process you might just go in that wrong direction.

If you listen to the critics and all the naysayers and new say you shouldn't do that too quickly before you do the same process, you might have what I call an “idea abortion” and a brilliant idea may never see the light of day.