What is the Value of an Idea?

By Robert Walker Cohen

Introducing, a perennial debate:

“All great things begin with an idea.” vs. “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”

The rhetorical impasse between the ideators and the executors is far from settled. Anyone that has an opinion on this will insist strongly that they are right, and give little credence to the opposing argument.

AI has introduced a new wrinkle into this contest. Ideas and creativity can now be generated instantaneously, and for those in search of the correct idea it can seem that judgment and taste are more important than imagination.

This modification mostly affects the ideators rather than the executors. Judgment and selection do require imagination and creative insight. The professional needs to be able to imagine the various alternatives and their workability, or to improvise from a presented idea set based on their cultivated expertise and understanding of the bigger-picture.

That said, the essence of the debate remains relevant today and may be presented as:

“Is it more important to ideate or to execute?”

Let’s steel-man each argument, using the metaphor of launching a manned rocket to Pluto.

THE IDEATOR

Steel-man: “If you can execute a long-distance flight to Pluto without any creative ideation beforehand, you may be guaranteed to fly but you are also guaranteed to never have the vision or strategic purpose to leave orbit to begin with. Your perfectly tuned rocket ship, rusting in a hangar.”

THE EXECUTOR

Steel-man: “If you ideate your trip to Pluto and you don’t have a properly engineered rocket, you won’t even be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. If you can’t execute and operationalize your flight to Pluto, all you have is a fancy idea and a whiteboard, nothing more.”

For me, both steel-men are completely wrong. Each argument has a silent-yet-catastrophic black hole at its center.

They are also both each correct, in their own way.

To explain —

The voyage to Pluto requires both visionary ideation and airtight execution. Ideators are needed to ensure that a strategic creative vision can drive the grand endeavor to liftoff, while the executors are essential to the ship’s bidirectional flight path across vast expanses of empty space.

Therefore, the ideator and executor are each right to insist on their importance to the mission.

Where they are wrong, is to denigrate the contribution of the other.

It is neither true that “great ideas are everything,” nor that “execution is everything.”

Both assumptions are lazy thinking. The reality is that ideas and execution are each inextricable from a broader whole.

To conclude, exiting Pluto’s orbit and applying an Earthly metaphor —

Having a great idea is like planting a healthy seed in a pot of soil on the window sill, where it can receive plenty of sunlight. This, on its own, is not enough.

Executing effectively requires that the seed must be nurtured, with daily watering, monitoring, protecting, and applying of the necessary nutrients, otherwise it will never grow. This, on its own, without a healthy seed, soil, or proper environment, is also not enough.

The value of an idea, then, is equivalent to the value of its execution.

The value of execution, therefore, is also equivalent to the value of the idea.

In other words, “The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.”