I often see projects of the form [come up with some ideas] → [find people to execute on ideas] → [hand over the project].
I haven’t really seen this work very much in practice. I have two hypotheses for why.
The skills required to come up with great projects are pretty well correlated with the skills required to execute them. If someone wasn’t able to come up with the idea in the first place, it’s evidence against them having the skills to execute well on it.
Executing well looks less like firing a canon and more like deploying a heat-seeking missile. In reality, most projects are a sequence of decisions that build on each other, and the executors need to have the underlying algorithm to keep the project on track. In general, when someone explains a project, they communicate roughly where the target is and the initial direction to aim in, but it’s much harder to hand off the algorithm that keeps the missile on track.
I’m not saying separating out ideas and execution is impossible, just that it’s really hard and good executors are rare and very valuable. Good ideas are cheap and easy to come by, but good execution is expensive.
A formula that I see more often works well is [a person has idea] → [person executes well in their own idea until they are doing something they understand very well “from the inside” or is otherwise hand over-able] → person hands over the project to a competent executor.
I agree with this and I appreciate you writing this up. I’ve also been mentioning this idea to folks after Michelle Hutchinson first mentioned it to me.
Why handing over vision is hard.
I often see projects of the form [come up with some ideas] → [find people to execute on ideas] → [hand over the project].
I haven’t really seen this work very much in practice. I have two hypotheses for why.
The skills required to come up with great projects are pretty well correlated with the skills required to execute them. If someone wasn’t able to come up with the idea in the first place, it’s evidence against them having the skills to execute well on it.
Executing well looks less like firing a canon and more like deploying a heat-seeking missile. In reality, most projects are a sequence of decisions that build on each other, and the executors need to have the underlying algorithm to keep the project on track. In general, when someone explains a project, they communicate roughly where the target is and the initial direction to aim in, but it’s much harder to hand off the algorithm that keeps the missile on track.
I’m not saying separating out ideas and execution is impossible, just that it’s really hard and good executors are rare and very valuable. Good ideas are cheap and easy to come by, but good execution is expensive.
A formula that I see more often works well is [a person has idea] → [person executes well in their own idea until they are doing something they understand very well “from the inside” or is otherwise hand over-able] → person hands over the project to a competent executor.
I agree with this and I appreciate you writing this up. I’ve also been mentioning this idea to folks after Michelle Hutchinson first mentioned it to me.