Ideas Happen When Execution Works and it is Safe to Fail

Ideas are just about everything. I say “just about” because like Maslow’s hierarchy, the basic things need to exist first. So humans need food and security before the other stuff, but life really would suck without the top items (love, esteem, and self actualization). The same goes in marketing. Without the ability to act on marketing ideas -- the ideas are worthless.

Marketing firms are often evaluated on their ability to execute, but that should just be the cost of getting into the dance. Once in, it is all in the ideas.

At NTR we build technology to make the execution so good that we can invest most of our energy in the highest value activities -- generating and testing ideas.

Indeed testing is essential because ideas come in both the good flavor and the bad flavor and all ideas have to be tested. The bad ideas have to be killed off to make room for testing yet more new ideas. Again this relies heavily on ease of execution. The kind of flexibility needed to implement a new idea and then kill it off -- requires amazingly effective execution.

One more thing. Having the strength of execution that enables the rapid change associated with testing ideas also requires a culture that accepts failure. Without it, people naturally hold on too tight to ideas that do not work. Worse yet, when the stakes are high enough (i.e. people with failed ideas get fired) we sometimes see people waste all kinds of resources dressing up bad ideas to make them look good.

So, ideas are everything and they require great execution and a culture that accepts failure.