Getting It Done

Let's all open our new-economy hymnals and sing together: Ideas are the source of competitive advantage! You can outthink your competition! The team with the best ideas wins!

Amen! But ...

Isn't it also true that ideas are perilously short-lived? That even the best idea has a miniscule half-life? That your precious intellectual capital can easily be begged, borrowed, or stolen?

Now let's turn the page and join in singing the next verse: Nothing is more important than getting it done! Today, implementation is the real source of competitive advantage! Even the best idea is only as valuable as your ability to execute it! The team that executes first wins!

How important is the flawless implementation of a great idea? Well, just ask Kevin Ulmer, president and CEO of Pavonis Inc.

In 1987, federal scientists were struggling to launch the Human Genome Project, an ambitious mapping of the entire human DNA sequence. Ulmer, now 49 (and who, at the time, was a molecular biologist living in Cohasset, Massachusetts), knew that getting the DNA sequence right would translate into designer foods, drugs, and other enormously profitable products. He also knew that the federal project was hindered by terminal slowness. He came up with a brilliant idea: Start a private genome project, crack the code fast -- and make untold amounts of money.

Ulmer's idea was a killer one, but his flawed implementation destroyed it. Instead of getting started fast by using off-the-shelf gene sequencers, Ulmer decided first to develop his own sequencing technology, so that he could crank out DNA code more efficiently. The decision proved his undoing: While Ulmer struggled to achieve perfection in his venture, SEQ Ltd., his rivals used existing sequencers to break the DNA code and win first-mover advantage. The result: Competitors such as Human Genome Sciences Inc. and Incyte Pharmaceuticals dominated the field, garnered venture capital, and made hundreds of millions of dollars selling their information to food and pharmaceuticals companies -- while Ulmer barely limped along. Looking back, Ulmer, who left SEQ in 1997, sees clearly the flawed execution that unhinged his brilliant idea. "I should have used the technology that was available," he laments. "If I had done that from the start, I would have been years ahead of the pack."

Ulmer's tale is becoming more and more familiar. Ideas are critical. Innovation is the mainspring of the new economy. But as more and more companies compete in ideas, the game changes to competing in the implementation of ideas. In this next stage of competition, getting an idea gives way to getting it done.

So how to close the gap between thought and action, between idea and execution? As the following examples demonstrate, how you get ideas done is just as much a matter of individual style, company culture, and character as how you generate those ideas in the first place. What counts is your commitment to implementation. After all, an average idea brilliantly implemented always beats a brilliant idea left unexecuted. Just ask Kevin Ulmer.

HelloAsia: Planning to Get It Done

It's day three at the HelloAsia.com corporate retreat, and the crowd at the rustic Santa Cruz, California country club is not what you'd call celebratory. Since April 1999, the Redwood City, California-based startup has been smashing its way into the Asian e-market with an ingenious business-to-business Web strategy: By offering free email service, HelloAsia.com attracts subscribers, who are then lured to the sites of its Asian corporate partners through a program called "AsiaRewards." The program gives subscribers points for visiting corporate-partner sites -- points that can be redeemed for such merchandise as books and electronics. Growth has been phenomenal: The one-year-old company has more than 500,000 subscribers, nearly 100 corporate partners, 95 employees, page after page of good press, and one of the largest first-round investments ever -- $20 million -- for an Internet company of its kind. And yet, in spite of all of this success, HelloAsia's employees will spend nearly every minute of their retreat not engaging in beer busts and team-building hijinks typical of Silicon Valley but working on the most mundane of corporate chores: grinding out precise business plans to guide the company's operation for the next six months.

Beaming like a proud Boy Scout troop leader, cofounder Henry Ellenbogen, 27, rattles off the "blueprints" that he's been handed by the company's functional teams. His marketing team, for example, has laid out exactly how many new customers -- and in what markets -- the company should reach in the coming year. The team knows exactly how many new local partners are needed to ensure growth and how to recruit those partners. Team members have scheduled promotional gigs, settling on each event's theme and time line. They've even scheduled a series of progress reviews. This, Ellenbogen says, is what execution looks like.