Why “Idea” People Are Risky and What to Do About It

I think the ideas vs execution is a false dichotomy.

In fast growing startups, there are people who can hack they way out of most problems quickly. Such people are immensely useful during the exploratory phase and early growth phase.

If the startup continue on their growth trajectory into next hyper growth phase, they need deep systems thinkers to build better end to end systems that can deal with the inevitable product complexity, org growth and user growth.

They obviously cannot build complex systems all by themselves. They need that team of hackers to believe in and execute their systems vision. They are usually good at selling their vision to the hackers as well as to the org leadership.

In really successful startups that become unicorns and beyond, there are also great visionary org leaders who can curate and evolve harmonious and motivated teams that execute well to keep pace with the growth of the company.

Of course, while in middle of it all, it feels very chaotic and out of control.

I’m an ideas guy and it’s been very frustrating to have to raise to ascend the stigma.

I iterate solutions much faster than most. Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding.

I know what people are talking about with the “all talk no action” person.

That’s not me, some of us really are excellent at iterating good ideas. It’s a discarded skill, but highly valuable once I’m on most teams, I can just never promote this strength due to the stigma.

I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back:

> I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot.

Link to full post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_...

> Not every “idea person” is a good fit for your small business. In fact, most will be a terrible fit. How can you tell?

TFA goes on to list three characteristics of people who are dud team members, and 5 characteristics of good team members, but it doesn't do what it claimed it will - tell you how to identify such a person at the hiring stage.

TFA is an example of what it warns against.

>2. Insistence on needing a “team” to implement the idea

yet in the paragraph author states,

> As it turns out, they’ve spent their career at a big company and didn’t fully realize that much of their success was actually a team effort.

Insisting that an idea needs a team means that the person DOES realize that their success was a team effort.

Glaring inconsistency, I stopped reading here.

An idea is a base quantity. A bad idea maybe worth 1, a good idea 10, a great idea 100. But execution is a multiplier. Good execution is a 10x. Great execution is a 100x.

An average idea with excellent execution is worth a lot more than a great idea with poor execution.

It never fails to amaze me how many non technical people - run of the mill (fill-in-a-word) people are on "hacker"news.

The person who said that he was an idea person who executes ideas all the time that it was stigmatized by morons is right.

In programming in particular, coming up with "ideas" and executing them immediately in your programming is pretty much a constant. And it's arguably what hacker, a real hacker, means by definition of word.

My experience is people who don't appreciate ideas are the first to plagiarize them, steal, or cover it up. In fact, its arguably what a lot of current big companies that are stagnating the country are running on. Advice - make sure you have no people in the company you make that think that way. Make it part of the interview - give them an opportunity to say the acceptably stigmatizing thing, and then eliminate them.

Another potential red flag attribute I've witnessed is shifting of the idea deliverablee\objectives after the green light is given. A partner I once had developed a pretty great idea we decided to execute on after 20+ hours of planning. He started proposing entirely new (follow-up) ideas mere hours into our execution. Then started morphing the original plan. 1 week later he was dropping idea bombs left and right. I finally delivered something close to the original plan and he spent the next 2 months slowly backing out of the project entirely, having put in less than 10% of the effort.

"The armchair quarterback. They love to wax poetic about what could be done yet when asked to get the ball rolling, they show no interest.

The act of calling out gaps and offering solutions is their sweet spot."

Is this saying that 'calling out gaps and offering solutions' is awesome as long as they help implement the solutions?

Asking because for every person I knew who espouses ideas and won't help (too few to recall any) there are scores upon scores upon scores of people who compulsively resist fixes - no matter how many resources are provided for.

“Someone that rose through the ranks”

IME, being able to actually do the work involved is the single best filter to reduce the risk of “idea people.”

People with “great ideas” who also previously did similar work themselves can be hugely valuable.

People with “great ideas” who lack first-hand knowledge of the tasks involved are usually not worth following. Usually.

The product management role comes to mind as one where we see this rule playing out far too often.

However, when I was at Netflix I saw a handful of notable exceptions. One of the Product Managers for recommendation algorithms was an expert at math but not engineering. That person had excellent ideas and was incredibly effective even though they needed a team to build their ideas. Another Product Manager I worked with also lacked an engineering background but was nonetheless very effective as a partner in projects we did together when I was an engineering manager. (In general, I think Netflix has some of the best PMs around.) Elsewhere, I’ve seen PMs routinely fail by promoting infeasible schedules, overreaching into the engineering agendas, or discounting engineers’ ideas—- the type of mistakes that are easy to make when someone lacks first-hand development experience.

The PMs who were the exceptions to the rule made up for their lack of first-hand engineering knowledge by years of experience “embedded” into software teams where they could build their sensitivity to engineering issues, which later allowed them to easily defer to engineers and eng. managers when those issues arose. They were also eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and get into the details with you to understand problems. Infinite curiosity but quick to delegate and defer to specialists. Those kind of “idea people” are awesome to work with.

BTW, I’ve also worked with plenty of great “idea people” who were engineers. They are awesome at creating ideas, refining them, AND building them. For an especially entertaining example, check out the Stuff Made Here channel on YouTube —- here’s a person with ideas great enough to attract tens of millions of views AND the electrical, mechanical, and software engineering skills to turn his ideas into reality. https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere

You can only be useful as an ideas guy if you're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. Everyone knows that, and that's why calling yourself and "ideas person" is received in exactly the same way that calling yourself the smartest person in the room is received: with some eye-rolling.

I've been generating tons of ideas my entire life. This is why I KNOW how cheap the ideas is and, also, how hard it is to implement something and make is usable/working/needed/cheap... And this is why I work as software developer (execution person), not manager\idea-generator. I must keep myself in ABILITY to implement things - this is what i don't have for free, unlike the ability of generating ideas: every day I have 5 new genious ideas of some city garbage collection automation with bidrs or a new neural-network GPS-replacement-by-photo thing. When I hear somene's good idea i STEAL it with no regret/sorry and with clear conscience. When person tell me its really GOOD idea, i just trying to implement it before he found a way to do this (this never happend with idea-people) and I dont give a shit who generated this idea, dont giving any credits to original person intentionally to punish idea-people for not goind anything. Also, knowing my ability to generate tons of ideas I feel no shame to steal another's ideas, because it cost nothing for me: I could generate this idea myself another day easily with the same genius quality. So, idea people, give me you ideas and go to hell. Tomorrow I talk to another idea-person and forget you. Ideas is like air: today i inhale the air who was exhaled by someone else and this is not called stealing. So, you must implement idea to proof its existance. Tell me that I stole your idea looking at my project - i dont care. Your blabla does not change whom MY working project belongs to, sorry, haha.

This describes me perfectly. And the struggle to be better at execution is huge. But with a lot of dedication and habit building I've been able to (partially) overcome it.

Let’s talk about what does work.

Assume you are a world-class ‘idea person’. That means that you know everything about your field, but you’re maybe not great at the specific skills. You have read everything in the technical literature. You know how your competitors operate and what they are working on. You have deep understanding of the customer. You know exactly why the big idea isn’t already a thing, and why each prior attempt failed.

Your job is to help other people organize their thoughts. It’s not to inject your own. Hackers need a lot of support. They need a sounding board to see if the logic make sense or if they are missing something. They might need to identify that one lynchpin problem that needs to be proved before anything else. They might need someone to ask foundational questions about why each component is necessary, or if there is an easier way to achieve the function they they want. They need to know what has been done already. They need to know what has been attempted and failed at, and why.

There are a huge number of ways that an ‘idea person’ can contribute. It’s also incredibly annoying and disruptive to push your own ideas on other people, not least because they probably suck, but you knew that, because you are a world-class idea person.

This article has a limited perspective. People have different skill sets, and valorizing one skill set and demonising another is something that is not very helpful. You as an engineer may want to say that your skill set is the most crucial one and others are worth less, but you know what? Other people are going to do the same to you, and often with more success.

For example, UX and design is now quite valued, and frequently you hear UX and design guys disparage engineering. Is that something we want to encourage? It's better to encourage making rational decisions about what skill set you need and who is best to supply them, so we are all judged on our merits and not based on self-marketting. Idea-generation is useful in a lot of contexts. Personally my best ideas have often been to figure out a way where we didn't need to execute a bunch of difficult stuff that the execution types were about to take on.

I profess, I'm an ideas guy. I do genuinely want to be a better executor, but I find it difficult to get myself to focus when I sit down to do things. I've come to think maybe I just really don't like technical work, but I've put so much time and effort into my career at this point it's a hard pill to swallow

Dreadful article. It’s not hiring the ‘ideas person’ that’s the problem, the problem is not understanding people’s strengths and weaknesses and failing to build a balanced team.

Some people are better at coming up with ideas, others are better at executing. Doesn’t mean one is better than the other, they just have different things to offer.

A team full of people who ‘get things done’ is just as bad as a team full of ideas people.

Belbin states that there actually nine roles needed for effective teams. Most people are strong in a few areas, but it’s almost impossible to be strong in all of them.

This article seems like it’s written by a Belbin ‘Shaper’ unable to see value in other people’s skills and viewpoints.

https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles

The problem with people who think of ideas and don't try to execute them is that they can't incorporate feedback. At best you get a second-hand explanation of why the magic thing can't be built.

You also end up with an attribution problem: it's easy to say what the big idea is, but it takes a lot of work to make it happen. Why give credit to the guy with the big picture, when the big picture is probably something the guy who implements it had as well? Devil is in the details.

You also don't get good ideas if you don't try to implement them. The implementation process is a creative process, which btw your ideas guy might not recognize, leading to issues.

I've had ideas guys where I worked before, and it was toxic. My view is basically that ideas guys are a kind of leech: they take credit for positive things that are obvious, they come up with excuses for things that are negative (team failed me boohoo), and they don't generate better ideas than people who are doing the implementation.

My experience is in quant trading, where you have people who can code, and sometimes people who just fluff about strategies. With the randomness and noise it's easy to be fooled by ideas guys, and it's taken me a long time to just dismiss the concept entirely. I actually just got off an interview where we discussed this problem in the space, and we agreed it's absolutely essential that people can code, otherwise their trading ideas are worthless.

Idea people are most of the time really creative. Creative people are most of the time more chaotic. This article is all about a well balanced team composition in the end. A team full of code robots does not work and a team full of 'idea people' does also not work.

Daydreaming in software development is imo not a disease but a symptom, and it's a form of escapism. Broken processes, extreme technical debt, tight project constraints, very limited resources, etc. all can lead to engineers wanting a way out.

The "how to start" point resonates with my experience. There's a cohort of "idea" people who are efficient at anticipating and clearing obstacles (including those that occur at inception around "how to start") without actually being all that great at executing those adjustments.

I think we value that type of contribution (often allocating it to leaders, though every contributor does it to some extent) even though it might not materialize as "doing" anything.

You need 'ideation' at every stage of the game, in every part of the business.

The 'skill' is to distill the ideas into an operational basis.

Both ops and new thinking are important.

This just sounds like bad understanding of how to hire the right people for the needs of your business.

If a coach fields a football team that's made up exclusively of quarterbacks, who's fault is that?

A team that can execute flawlessly, but has no vision and no solid ideas is not useful. A team that can come up with a million 'good' ideas, but has no ability to execute is just as bad.

Ultimately, your org needs to be built of the right balance of both sets of skills.

There is no such thing as an "idea" person who is valuable because of their ideas. If they appear valuable, it's because they also have actual experience with execution, or more frequently, they have money or connections (which I don't say to necessarily denigrate, this kind of person can be very useful as well.)

> They were great at leading, not doing.

Wow, since when "leading" isn't the most difficult/well-paid job in our society?

Overall, I think the author is mixing up apples with oranges and that's why this article sounds so weird. It's a very contradicting piece right here.

Just wanted to add - the worst "ideas person" I ever knew delivered an endless stream of really obvious ideas. An ideas person who delivers good ideas that no-one else has thought of can be useful, independent of their implementation skills

Execution takes grit; people skills (if you need to create buy-in); and really some level of belief in the outcome.

I had to change the development process and cycle of my team, and even with instant buy-in it was tough.

Given the list of what makes an execution person, would be a dumb mistake for someone like that to work for someone else. If you can do it all yourself, others would just slowly you down, seemingly.

> While ideas get most of the fanfare, they don’t really matter unless steps are taken to make them work in your business.

Stopped reading here. It's not about ideas, it's about having an understanding what could be done. If thinking is grounded in reality and your resource constrains, ideas are worth a lot. Otherwise all your company would do is copy other companies.

I'm an "execution" guy. I make things happen. Been doing it my entire adult life. It's incredibly valuable, and "idea people" know it.

But they won't say it.

If I had a dime for every "idea person" that wanted me to realize their harebrained AI-powered cheese straightener, for nothing, and they get all the money and credit, because it's "their idea," I'd be rich.

Yeah, I'm cynical.