Sure, You Can’t Make Everything Yourself

A former boss once told me to let others execute our best ideas.  “We don’t have to.  Execution is not where scale and margin are,” he said.

He was right that we didn’t have to execute our own ideas.  So my team and I watched others botch some of our best ideas.  And botch and botch.  Ah, how great ideas in the wrong hands become just good.  Or worse.

Scale, you say.  And you’re right.  We can’t make everything.  And we’ll never be built to.  But we know the price we pay when a brilliant idea is flubbed in execution.  It’s not just the cost of the opportunity.  It’s the surging ache the team feels knowing we didn’t fight to make it for ourselves.  And how much better the thing itself — the very idea of it — would’ve become in the making.

“The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. “

                                                                                                                                                             – Steve Jobs


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