Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is how Jeff Jarvis refers to the lawsuit brought by the Winklevoss twins, which alleged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them:

It’s just business. And as for the Winklevii, they didn’t invent crap. Ideas, especially obvious ones, are worthless; every entrepreneur and geek knows that execution is everything. Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t invent crap, either, but he did execute. That’s business.

In his discussion of the movie, Lawrence Lessig makes the same point more strongly (both posts are worth reading in full too, as they discuss important issues raised by the film):

The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

Why does Lessig think this is absurd? Because, like Jarvis, he believes that innovation is all about idea execution, not idea generation. Here is how he describes it:

In 2004, a Harvard undergraduate got an idea (yes, that is ambiguous) for a new kind of social network. Here’s the important point: He built it. He had a bunch of extremely clever clues for opening up a social space that every kid (anyone younger than I am) would love. He architected that social space around the social life of the kids he knew. And he worked ferociously hard to make sure the system was stable and functioning at all times. The undergraduate then spread it to other schools, then other communities, and now to anyone.

There’s not really much to add (especially since we’ve dealt with this topic a number of times already!). In innovation, execution really is everything.

For some ideas on how to act on this idea, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble is a good place to start. I’ll talk more about this book soon, but for now, here is Govindarajan making the same point as Jarvis and Lessig – execution is everything!

I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. We were a commercial station (one of the few commercial college stations around), so we had advertising.

The people that sold ads got some commissions, but every other person working there was a volunteer. Not only were they volunteers, but since they were all students at the time, they were volunteers that probably had more important things to be doing than working at the radio station – like studying.

And yet, the station had to stay on the air. We needed DJs to play records, people to filter through all the music sent to us, people to put together newscasts and then deliver, people to do play-by-play for our university’s sports broadcasts, engineers to keep the transmitter working, producers to make ads, and promotions people to try to encourage listeners to give us some of their time.

That’s a lot of jobs – especially for a pack of volunteers that all have other things on which they’re supposed to be spending their time.

And there were crises. The day I was named Station Manager two of the most experienced people at the station wanted to quit because they weren’t happy with how the job allocations for the coming year had been handled. So I had to figure out how to keep them happy, without being able to force them to do anything, and without much in the way of compensation to offer them (other than appreciation).

In the course of dealing with those problems, and with the other issues that got in the way of keeping the station on the air, I learned a lot about what motivates people, and what rewards them. Some of the things I learned are:

• Passion trumps everything: passion is what kept the station running. It’s why I got involved with it in the first place. All of us were passionate about finding music and sharing it with people (or sharing the news, or sports). How can you keep a group of 120 volunteers going? Purpose.
• You can’t use power: when everyone is a volunteer (with more important things that the should probably be doing!), you can’t force them to do anything. If they don’t like the situation, they’ll quit.
• The number one job of managers is to remove obstacles: when you have neither carrots nor sticks to fall back on for motivation, you develop a different set of management skills. Finding the things that motivate people is one of them. The big one though is figuring out how to clear out the obstacles that prevent people from getting things done. A good manager is not a director, but rather a supporter.

Most of you aren’t managing all-volunteer organisations, so you may ask: so what? Here’s the thing that I realised though – the more I managed in “real” businesses, the more I realised that all of the lessons I learned at the radio station still held true. Carrots and sticks don’t work very well anymore (see the talk by Dan Pink). Here’s how Douglas Rushkoff puts it in Get Back in the Box:

These top-down, regimented forms of group cohesion could not cope with the complexity of real human beings interacting with one another. Our newfound ability to embrace more complex dynamics changes all this. Instead of trying to get everyon to conform to a simple set of commands, a great manager, organizer, or leader strives to create an environment or provide the tools through which people naturally cooperate.

So answer this question then act on it and you’ll be a better manager:

What would I do differently if everyone reporting to me was a volunteer?