Not All Ideas Are Genius. But They Have to Be Realised.

Leaders often fall in love with the big idea.

The silver bullet.

The breakthrough that could change everything.

If you’ve been at it long enough, you’d know that most ideas aren’t genius. Some are mediocre. Others are downright bad.

And if you wait around for brilliance before you act, you’ll be waiting a long time. Maybe even forever.

The magic isn’t in the genius. It’s in realisation.

And that’s why execution always beats perfection.

Why Execution Beats Perfection

• A bad idea executed teaches you more than a brilliant idea that dies on a whiteboard.

• A scrappy launch creates feedback loops that no amount of debate in a conference room can reveal.

• A flawed attempt still pushes the team forward, while “perfect plans” only make slides look pretty.

Execution pulls reality into the room. Something thinking in a meeting room can never do.

The Leader’s Role

Leadership isn’t about being the filter that screens out everything until the flawless idea arrives. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The leader’s job is to create an environment where ideas see daylight. Where teams are encouraged to hypothesise, test, validate, iterate and learn.

When people are scared to be wrong, they’ll never put forward the ideas that could change the game. But when they know the team values realisation over perfection, they’ll keep experimenting. That’s where I’d put my money on seeing brilliance.

Execution Transforms Ideas

Execution has a funny way of upgrading “average” ideas into surprisingly powerful ones. The act of shipping forces refinement. Customer feedback sparks improvements. A mediocre idea evolves into something better simply because it was put into motion.

The graveyard of genius is filled with ideas that never saw the light of day. The legacy of leadership is written by the ones that did.

The messy, imperfect and risky ideas that someone had the courage to out put into the world.