If I ever succumb to the temptation to blog like I did last night, feel free to shoot me. Now, back to our regular programming…

Last week, I wrote about having heroes in your craft and how I found it noteworthy that some examples are more effective than others in everyone’s path to self-improvement. I attributed it to the vague concept of compatible brain-patterns, but really I think it’s a much more simple idea. The reason that my writing heroes have an influence on my craft is because I practice it. In other words, there is a right mix of idea and execution (I would call it semi-right as there’s much room for improvement).

There are plenty of blog posts about this. Most well-known to me is Derek Sivers’ blog post about the “execution multiplier” that makes ideas more or less valuable:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

More recently, Sarah Lacy wrote a post on Techcrunch, entitled “Is Execution More Important than Vision?,” where she differentiates between entrepreneurs that are visionary vs. those that are good at execution. In other words, she categorises people as either fitting in the one or the other.

What is clear from all of these is that ideas unapplied are essentially worthless. Which to me means three things:

1. That if you have ideas in an area that is difficult for you to execute on, you’re probably better off focussing on areas where you can execute them.
2. Or, that it is equally important to find the right resources (skills & knowledge, network & team, money & customers) for your idea as it is to have the idea.
3. That you ultimately need to move towards a system of rapid iteration or rapid prototyping, because, as we all know, ideas are ideas, and the reality will more often than not change your original product idea. The quicker you can test them out and improve them, the better your chances of making a commercial success.

It’s a bit of a leap from my post about writing heroes to executing entrepreneurial ideas, I know, but I think it makes sense.

Vincent

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Ironically, this lesson comes from a manufacturer of hardware (mostly), Nvidia. In a “Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought-leaders” podcast lecture on the role of Vision when building companies, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia says:

[ca. 30 min. in, responding to a question about how the culture of Nvidia was built]
At the core of our company’s success is innovation. A lot of companies say that innovation is important to their company. However, I don’t think you can fundamentally say that you want to nurture the spirit of innovation as a CEO, unless you have a culture of risk-taking. We have to encourage our all of our employees to take calculated risks.

It’s a matter of courage. Most people hate to fail. If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to develop a tolerance for failure. That doesn’t mean fail purposefully. Instead, I want you to try things even though it is impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success, that your instincts, your intuition are something you should follow. Where would we be today, without the intuition of our employees? So you have to have the tolerance for risk-taking.

The thing about failure is this. If you fail often enough, you might actually become a failure! Which is not the same as being successful [laughter]! So the question is, how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly? And to change course, as soon as you know it’s a dead end? And the way to do that, is we call it “Intellectual Honesty.” We assess, on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind!
…
…
That type of culture is very necessary in today’s environment, with competition coming all over the world, 24/7, especially for webservices, where ideas take no time to experiment. A particular company could throw out 20 ideas into the world. So unless you are thoughtful about risk taking, and being able to change your mind, react to market conditions, and being flexible, how are you going to stay alive?

You can almost see what I just described in the nature of older companies and in the nature of newer companies. The modern companies, look at Google, almost every single application is in Beta form! They’re trying all kinds of stuff, right? If they call it production, and it doesn’t work well, you guys would just be upset at them. So they call it BETA! So they can try a lot of things. And it it works, do more, and if it fails, get rid of it.

Innovation requires a little bit of experimentation. Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure. Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment! And if you don’t ever experiment, you will never innovate, you don’t succeed… You’ll just be a dweeb! That’s it!

And that’s why I dig the business of software. Not because I want to be a coder, but because it serves as an example, as an ideal of all the business ventures I want to do. The kind that encourage quick experimentation, developing and building on systems and infrastructures that allow for reducing the cost of failure, and increasing the chance of radical innovation.

Tons of other valuable lessons in that podcast, but this is the one I dug the most.

Vincent

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