Are Your Good Ideas Killing Your Great Ideas?
My name is Nick and I am an Idea-holic.
According to the good folks at the Gallup organization, “Ideation” is my top strength. In practice, that means I flood my days with ideas–sometimes great ones, sometimes good ones, and other times absurd ones. Usually, after only a few minutes of sober reflection, I can easily decide which ideas are on par with the Jump-to-Conclusions Mat. But if you’ll pardon my brief public display of self-love, some of my ideas are pretty darned good. And that’s precisely the problem.
The truth is that we just don’t have unlimited time, energy and resources. By ‘we’ I’m not just talking about individuals. That truth applies to organizations as well–a point I was reminded of in this article from Robert Sutton in HBR. Sutton quotes Steve Jobs from a talk he gave at Stanford during which Jobs says that to create an innovation-producing environment, you need to measure two things:
1. How many good ideas are you killing?
2. How many people are complaining–and even leaving–because of good ideas being killed.
(HINT: This isn’t golf so low scores don’t win) Of course you want to encourage lots of great ideas from your self and your people. But you have to be ruthless about deciding which ideas are truly worth pursuing with your limited resources, and which ideas need to get whacked by an oncoming truck.)
The trouble is that one person’s great idea might only be another person’s good idea. That makes it hard to decide which idea fits which category in your specific case…unless you’ve clearly defined your Decision Pulse. Great ideas aren’t just those that will “work.” Great ideas are those that will work and ideas that align with that thing that makes you unique to the marketplace–what I call your “Decision Pulse.” (Click here if you need help finding your Pulse.)
Whether you’re trying to find out which personal networks to focus on building; which products to invest in; which people to hire; or which jobs to focus on hunting down, you’ve got to be ruthless about deciding which “good” ideas you need to slay, so that you can nurture the great ideas.
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