Ideas are Worthless
An idea – in and of itself – is worthless. The value in an idea only lies in its implementation, in doing something with it, in bringing it into the world. Most organizations are full of good ideas although few are full of great ideas. The great ideas are the ones that you can implement, that evolve with implementation as part of the criteria we use to pass judgment on it.
A Fortune 500 executive recently told me that they have plenty of great ideas … they just don’t know how to implement them. Well, I had to disagree with him because a great idea has its implementation built into it. Great ideas are ones where the implementation is obvious (not always easy, but always apparent). At some point in the evolution of your idea you need to build the implementation into the idea itself. The fifth chapter of my book explains how.