The Fallacy of Execution (and Sex), or Why Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Answer Questions About Facebook's Origins

Running a company in Silicon Valley, you hear a lot of advice. It is sometimes offered by those esteemed individuals who are invited to speak on panels at conferences, by professors, by family members, by friends, by enemies, by the wealthy, by the not-as-wealthy, by the invested, and by the generally apathetic. Some of it is definitely good advice and some of it is definitely bad, and it comes regardless of whether or not the people giving it are actually qualified to do so. Often, it directly contradicts advice you've heard in the past. What is truly striking is that so frequently advice comes in the form of the cliché: the pat phrase that will supposedly solve all of your problems and transform you and your business into the next success story on the front page of The Major Newspaper--and of all the business clichés in the world, there is none that I hear more, and that I hate more, than the vague, poorly-defined and generally ill-conceived notion that "execution" is more important than "the idea."

There are a number of analogies that are quite illustrative when examining why the idea-versus-execution paradigm is pointless to even discuss in the first place. The simplest analogy among them is sex. There are two genders that we generally recognize: male and female. Both have their role in sexual reproduction; without one or the other, it is by definition impossible for sexual reproduction to take place. It would be pointless (and also wrong) to argue that male sex cells are "more important" than female ones, or vice-versa, which is why it's not an argument you see very often in journals that biologists read, such as Cell or Nature. If we suppose that a successful company, like a successful embryo, needs two complementary inputs to form--in this case, both a profitable idea that solves a problem, and execution on that idea--where the lack of either one guarantees a result of failure, then it should be patently obvious why it doesn't make sense to weigh one of those source's importance against the other's. (Granted, there are also a number of differences between companies and mammals, but there's a good chance that it's the similarities that led you to read this in the first place.)

Despite such thinking, or perhaps in spite of it, many people go on to assume that execution is more important than the idea, perhaps because anyone can have an [intriguing and profitable] idea--another common notion that is also false. Some of those same people continue to draw myriad conclusions from their apparent insight. These conclusions are similar to the kind of mathematical results that can be derived by dividing by zero. (In eighth grade, our math teacher proved that 0 = 1 by doing just that.) One such false conclusion is that "the idea actually doesn't matter at all," implying that the importance of the idea is equal to zero, and that "with proper execution, any idea can be made into a successful company." This is of course false. There are some ideas--say, the combination iron/cellular telephone, the imageless television, or the disposable jumbo jet--that even the best execution can't save. Put another way, the above conclusion means that there are no bad ideas, even while reality clearly indicates this not to be the case.

Another problem with the idea versus execution argument is that while the word "idea" has a relatively clear meaning, the word "execution" does not. Effectively, it refers to everything that isn't the idea, and in turn, that means that "execution" refers to a whole wide array of confounding factors that would make any serious student of statistics blanche. Funding? It's part of execution. Hiring decisions? Execution. Corporate culture? That would fall under execution. Engineering? Also execution. Marketing? Execution. Ethics? Oddly enough, ethics also falls under execution, which raises an interesting point.

There's another cliché that says, "rules are made to be broken," and indeed some rules seem to be. When those same rules are also laws, however, the situation becomes more complicated. If successful execution on an idea--for the sake of argument, one that could save millions of lives--requires breaking a law, is it worth executing on? Or if the legality of execution isn't clearly illegal, but falls into a gray area, does that change things? What if executing involves murdering one person (the literal case of idea versus execution)? What if the idea's benefit is nebulous in all of the above cases? Personally I would argue that regardless of the idea, execution strategies clearly involving even gray areas of the law should be out of bounds for entrepreneurs, if only because paying endless legal fees is rarely good for business.

There are plenty who might disagree, though, notably including every software mogul most people have ever heard of. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and even Steve Jobs are not celebrated for their kindness or moral rectitude. Just as we do with oil and energy, as a society we tend to accept that the benefits of using software outweigh the costs of developing it, which sometimes can include the strategic destruction of other programmers' companies and careers.

If and when it happens, all of this, too, is "execution." While I wasn't present when Microsoft, Oracle or Apple got started, I did happen to be around for the beginnings of another technology company in 2004 to witness what the word execution meant then.

I've been told time and again that the reason Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook succeeded over my own at Harvard is that I simply didn't "execute," while my classmate did. And so without casting any blame, I'd like to put everything that notion implies to rest. In his latest thirty-minute-long interview, Mark didn't mention anything about the fully-functional and heavily-marketed houseSYSTEM integrated student portal that was far more than a mere idea, the "Facebook" component that he joined along with his co-founders, the hours he spent visiting and re-visiting the site in January of 2004, or the Harvard College Student Entrepreneurship Council that created it, let alone the decades-long history of face books at educational institutions across the country. That doesn't mean that those products, organizations and events never happened, however. There's plenty of evidence indicating that they did.

So the next time you consider the importance of execution in a business situation, take the time to analyze exactly what it is you mean. The phrase "execute better" has never helped anybody. It's just about as helpful as telling someone to "do everything better," which is at best not helpful at all, and at worst insulting, since it demonstrates a lack of interest in getting to any real core issue. Worse yet, by endorsing a litany of things you never meant to, you'll identify yourself as one of those shallow Silicon Valley types who doesn't really think things through. And if we ever want to get out of our present economic slump, the last thing we need is more people in the Valley who don't think.

Aaron Greenspan is President & CEO of Think Computer Corporation and the author of Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era.

 

 

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Comments

[condor101]

Actually, execution is essential to any business and more important than just the "idea". An idea is the genesis, but what separates the men from the boys is execution. Facebooks' worth in the billions is a testament to that fact.

The idea of facebook.com on its' own would not have generated hundreds of millions of users and subsequent substantial worth and value. It was the implementation and execution of the website that made Facebook a giant in social media.

[Kuuba]

Facebook is a testament to the fact that you don't have to have an original thought.

[asus389]

The other thing people fail to acknowledge is that at the time "Facebook" in its current form started (2004) there was already a fairly successful site that did the exact same thing called "Friendster" which was started in 2002. Even ignoring the fact the Zuckerberg probably "borrowed" (to put it kindly) FB from the already existing system at Harvard – Friendster had the same thing running 2 years earlier with a significant user base.

[rbryanh]

Then again, you could come very young to the sensible conclusion that capitalism is a testosterone fueled limbic brain dominance orgy whose primary function is to transmit insatiable greed.

I've been successful and I've pet a cat. I smile when I think of the cat.

His food doesn't cost much. Neither does mine. When I feel like running the world, I masturbate and take a nap.

[Kuuba]

Aaron, Mark comes across as a slimeball IMO.

What I can't understand is, why on earth you don't make the records public by showing how he visited your site so often while in Harvard.

Show him to be the copycat that he is, he doesn't strike me as someone who could intelligent enough to even come up with any ideas of his own.

I have to give you credit for being able to bite your lip in regards to Mark, kudos to you, I sure couldn't do it.

[Aaron Greenspan - Huffpost Blogger]

Hello,

There are actually hyperlinks to the evidence in the article above, but in case you missed them, here they are again:

http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/timeline.pdf
http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/20071129.deposition.pdf
http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html

I've done my best to make the information public!

Aaron

[Tim Berry - Huffpost Blogger]

Interesting post as usual Aaron, but I think you're missing the real meaning of the ideas vs. execution discussion. It's not for nothing that intellectual property is about inventions (patents) or creative works (copyright) or commercial phrases (trademarks), while you can't do anything really solid to claim ownership of an idea except to build a company around it. And lots of great companies have been built on used ideas, and some on bad ideas. Ideas are copied all the time. I think the underlying point of the discussion is that having or claiming an idea gives you absolutely no claim on the success of the person who built a company based on that idea. Most good ideas float around for a while, hundreds or thousands of people have them, and it is rarely the person who first had the idea (as if anybody could actually really know who did) who builds the success on top of it. And from what I've seen of your work -- I liked your book, by the way, and I look forward to your posts here -- I believe you about having had the Facebook idea at the same time as Mark Z. That story is a great example of the relative value of ideas vs. actually building a company.

[Aaron Greenspan - Huffpost Blogger]

Tim,

Though I appreciate your taking the time to comment, and I realize that ideas do not come endowed with ownership rights, I am actually arguing against exactly the kind of logic you've employed in the paragraph above. It is simply untrue that "great companies" have been "built on...bad ideas." It takes a good idea (which I define more clearly in the article) to build a successful company AND a host of diverse actions (collectively called "execution" by many) to make the idea into a business. Dismissing unsuccessful companies with good ideas as having been "poorly executed" is misleading when the very nature of the poor execution involves ethical lapses on the part of others. Doing so amounts to blaming the victim for someone else's crime and ignores a lot of complexity inherent in the process of starting a company.

Aaron

[aztecfrench]

I totally agree w/ your post and your answer to Tim.
Perhaps you could expand to the idea that this excuse collectively called 'execution'
is just another way to say that the end justify just any mean.
and as such capitalism has been corrupted.
Best regards, I enjoy your thinking.

[condor101]

In essence, your above arguments don't make sense. I'll use the following analogy to make my point. Assume that I had a friendship with Jeff Bezos in the early 90's and I told him that I had an idea of selling books on the internet under the name "Amazon". I was declaring my idea, one that any person on the planet could have thought of. Bezos decided that he liked the name and idea and subsequently acquires the domain name amazon.com and proceeds to build a website to sell books. He also files a trademark for "Amazon" related to the class of services he is providing.

Now, with this scenario, did he use my idea? Yes. But the fact is that my idea had no legal protection. I could have told him my idea to sell books online and sat on that idea for months, maybe years. Is he to blame for executing on that idea? Of course not.

Or let's take it in a different path; Perhaps I was working on a website for selling books online at the domain, rainforestbooks.com. Bezos liked my idea but thought to himself that "Amazon" was a better name and he executed a trademark application to protect that brand name and he acquired the domain name, amazon.com and started building a website to sell books on his website.

[condor101]

Now, would he have done something wrong, criminally? No. Would he have done something wrong morally? No, not at all. He was smart enough to know that amazon.com would be a better name than rainforest books.com. The same manner in which Zuckerberger thought that "Facebook" was a better name than Friendster or other names that he knew or heard about.

An idea only has value if you do something and protect it and execute a plan around the idea. In regard to the drama of the origin of Facebook, you make yourself to sound as a victim.
Did you own the domain, facebook.com? No.
At the time of your idea, did you file a trademark application for "facebook' on the USPTO.gov website? No.
It only takes less than an hour to complete an application.

When one has a wonderful idea, before they tell someone, they should first file a trademark application and acquire the related domain name. After this they can blab all they want about the idea and the name. As they say, possession and a registered trademark is nine-tenths of the law.

[Rule Of Law]

Aaron, you've told us what it was that Didn't ensure his success--e­xecution--­but you never got close to telling us who or what was behind him that Did create Facebook's success.

The rumors have been rampant since Facebook's inception. Care to comment?

[Aaron Greenspan - Huffpost Blogger]

I go into some detail about this in my book, but I think the most frequently overlooked ingredient in Facebook's success was the press, and namely The Harvard Crimson.

Aaron

[Rule Of Law]

Thanks for the reply. Now I'll have to read your book. Dang, you're good!

;-)

[chrispo]

Only reason Facebook succeeded is the domain name. Long before Mark Z. even existed, schools like Harvard, Georgetown (where I went) and others had something called.... a Facebook. What was it? A printed book we all got at the beginning of every year. What was in it, a picture of all of your classmates with a little profile below it (with name, where from, and maybe a little blurb). So an online version was due to be born, I'm actually just surprised it took as long as it did. Cheers!