DorintheFlora

Thanks to everyone who replied (or upvoted me). FYI, I am going to try to start exploring these ideas here:

http://dorintheflora.blogspot.com/

I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you pay close attention to behavior, you can infer what people really think, on a deeper level than what they admit to. We have concepts for that in spiritual and psychological realms but not really in the realm of business. We have ideas like karma and Akashic records and the subconscious and Freudian slips. In crime/law (police, courts), we have ideas concerning motive and intent. We don't have ideas like that in business, at least not in a well developed, formal fashion. I think those deeper patterns determine whether an idea has legs or not and it is those deeper patterns we need to figure out how to talk about, how to mentally model, etc. Those patterns are the ones that are not armchair politician style pontification but we don't really have a formal framework for examining ideas deeply and thoroughly for business purposes.

(Edit: In some ways we do have such a framework. For example, I am sure that venture capitalists have a lot of paradigms for doing just that. But this meme of "ideas do not matter" still persists and is oft repeated by venture capitalists themselves.)

To try to get things rolling: Mine is @DorintheFlora.

I am of the opinion that "ideas are nothing, execution is everything" grows in part out of the lack of adequate language and mental models to distinguish amongst ideas of the armchair politician variety and ideas with legs. There are some words to distinguish such things, like hypothesis and theorem, but they mostly don't apply in the realm of business. I have been trying to sort out how to do a post on that very topic but I am not ready for it.