Amatures vs Professionals
Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics
Omar Bradley
Anybody can come up with good ideas. No matter how clever you think you are – ideas are cheap. Trust me, someone’s almost certainly thought of your super-cool idea.
Even if your idea isn’t particularly unique, it’s in the EXECUTION where the professional is separated from the amateur. Can you actually build it? Can you make the right tradeoffs to build it on time? On budget? With high quality? Will it be sustainable or turn into a maintenance nightmare? In a way that customers will like and use? That’s the logistics.
You can’t just say “I’m going to buy an RV park” and expect to pull that off by the end of the week. A professional knows that there is a required amount of time for each step and the sum of those is the actual time it takes to realistically make a purchase. When you make unreasonable expectations you put yourself under undo stress and may even abandon the idea of buying an RV park because you feel that you are a failure. Instead, put a decent timetable to each action step and, even then, acknowledge that there is some element of luck involved in finding an RV park and will remain persistent even if you start to violate your initial time allocation.
AMATEURS TALK STRATEGY AND PROFESSIONALS TALK LOGISTICS
Idea people lead teams full of chaos, missed deadlines, and failure because they don’t know the logistics of how to make the idea reality. The logistics are what separates good ideas from a bad ideas. Working out the logistics tells you if you can actually deliver the idea on time, with high quality, and in a sustainable way.
There’s a second layer of logistics beyond just delivering on time.
Countless MP3 players and cell phones were made before Apple got into the game. But Apple destroyed them all. Apple’s success was not due to having a technologically superior product or particularly unique ideas. Instead, they knew how to define an experience then constrain the product to something the logistics said they could solve in a delightful way. The technology experts picked the right technology/methods to deliver the experience flawlessly – versus what would do the same thing but give poor or inconsistent experiences. That one approach is what led Apple to completely dominate the music and phone market when dozens of other players were first and had more modern technology.
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