Is that even the question that should be asked? Are ideas still at the core of the businesses of advertising, media, and communications planning?
These are questions that floated in my mind as I read about Seth Godin's Blog in response to a question that was posted to him as to why he 'shares' ideas freely. His response was classic-Seth-Godin: Simple and profound. Here was his response:
I responded that ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard.
My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create, at least it does for me.
I particularly liked his last two paragraphs in his post - and to a certain extent, I am guilty of having ideas but have too cowardly, scared, or perhaps, too concerned about being liked, respected, and keeping the peace that I have let them stay on in my notebook of ideas.
History is littered with inventors who had "great" ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with do-ers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.
So, if you've got ideas, let them go. They're probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.
The last paragraph, though, I would insert one word - I would add in "exciting" after the word "hard" and before the word "work".
