“There are a lot of good ideas. Translating a good idea into a great product is unbelievably hard.”
The Translation Is the Work
From the D10 conference (AllThingsD, May 31, 2012), where Ellison and Pixar president Ed Catmull appeared on stage to discuss the legacy of Steve Jobs. Per AppleInsider’s coverage, Ellison gave the line while pushing back on the narrative that Jobs copied the Macintosh from Xerox PARC, and continued: “Steve would translate good ideas into a finished product unlike anyone in the industry.”
Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, turned the point into a multiplication table: idea quality is the multiplier, from negative one to twenty; execution is the base, from one dollar to ten million. A brilliant idea with no execution is worth twenty dollars. The same idea with brilliant execution: two hundred million.