Ideas are easy; execution is the hard part – Balancing Creativity and Execution

By Marita Greenidge

Sitting in an entrepreneurship class at Simon I was told that by the professor that I should not be afraid of telling other people about my ideas. I could get insightful feedback and I could also solidify the concept as I talked about it more and more.

“Was he serious?” Suppose someone stole my idea! But something else came out in that class that had also arisen in one of my strategy classes and remains one of my mantras – “Ideas are easy; execution is the hard part”. So I could in fact tell my idea to several people and perhaps they could try to copy it but there was no guarantee that they could pull it off like I could.

This brings me to my point – how do we balance creativity and execution? How many times have you sat in strategy sessions while a team of brilliant people come up with fabulous ideas that get shoved in a drawer never to be heard from again?

That’s probably because it’s so great to allow your mind to roam free and spout ever interesting idea that bypasses. It makes you sound really smart! And who doesn’t want to sound really smart? But it’s an entirely different animal to try to execute that idea. It requires a strong leader who can appropriately allocate human and capital resources and motivate those human resources to do a good job.

I’ll give you an example of how we do it at Bimventures. We hold strategic visioning retreats to gather ideas for improvement of our system or processes. We involve everyone in the Bimventures family because you never know where good ideas lie. At the retreat we host sessions that are designed to answer specific questions about areas we want to improve.

For example, we may ask the question of what do we need to do to heighten the probability that entrepreneurs accepted to the fund develop successful enterprises. We could get a flood of ideas about improving our selection process and what characteristics we should look for in an entrepreneur or a shepherd.

All great stuff! But then someone has to be charged with ensuring recommended changes are actually implemented. Someone has to formally change the selection criteria and also ensure that the new criteria are followed.

So how do you really achieve the balancing act? Gather a bunch of ideas; choose those that are realistic and help achieve your desires in a cost effective manner; work on an action plan and timeline for implementing and put someone in charge of executing the process. Creativity is great but on its own it never made anything happen until someone used it to make a difference.