The Cost of a Good (Or Not-So-Good) Idea

Being an "idea machine" is part of the entrepreneur’s job description. We’re hard-wired to come up with great plans and then see them through to completion. 

However, this incredible strength can also become a weakness when taken too far. 

Have you ever come up with a bona fide “great idea,” only to realize it’s a dud that costs your company time, energy, and money? Even worse, did someone say, “I knew that wasn’t a great plan,” after the fact?

I’ve had this experience one too many times.   

There was an era of my career when I had no way of distinguishing between good and bad ideas because no one felt empowered enough to tell me. I wasn’t open to feedback. I wasn’t approachable. 

I’d walk into a meeting and hijack the agenda. “You know what?” I’d say, “That reminds me of a book I read this weekend that had a case study about something another company is doing. What do you guys think about that?”

Instead of gently pushing back or reminding me of the meeting’s actual agenda, everyone at the meeting would nod their head, and then we’d start talking about this new possibility. Just like that, the meeting was hijacked, I’d wasted everyone’s time, and I may have sent one or two employees on a needless hunt to research and implement the idea.

To be fair, I wasn’t trying to be unapproachable or a jerk. I was simply energized by everything I was learning at the time and derived a lot of satisfaction from sharing my ideas. It was like a hit of dopamine.

The problem with my process was that these ideas were underdeveloped. They weren’t being filtered properly, and I wasn’t really seeking meaningful feedback. They were just dumping of ideas—and they were costing my business money and me a loss of credibility.

I’ve found that the solution to distinguishing between good and bad ideas is to learn how to be approachable. When you invite dialogue and allow others to question your ideation process, you gain critical feedback that could help save a lot of grief in the end.

The Cost of a Good (or Not So Good) Idea

When you’re not the person doing the implementation, it’s easy to forget that every new project you assign to an employee has a tremendous impact on their workload. Coming up with the idea is the easy part; the actual work is in making it operational.

Every time I blurted out an idea, I took an employee off course. Then before they could come back to me with feedback, I had dumped another two more ideas on them. My staff were drowning in a sea of ideas—and most of them weren’t any good!

If you’re not soliciting feedback from your team on an ongoing basis—especially on ideas that may affect the operation of your company—you may not be the leader you would like to be. I know that is how I felt, and I knew something had to change. 

Invite Feedback From People You Trust 

To address this problem and take steps to become more approachable, the first step I took was to develop a leadership team composed of five respected staff from different departments of the company. The leadership team’s job was to evaluate my ideas honestly, responding with helpful feedback and pushback.  

No matter what, I was always going to be an idea machine; that’s just what entrepreneurs do. But with my leadership team, I had a group of people who would help me create discipline, structure, and rigor around these ideas.

Good Ideas Will Rise To The Top

I still believe in being an idea machine and striking when the iron is hot. An entrepreneur who isn’t constantly looking to improve outputs isn’t fully committed. 

I’ve certainly learned the value of making informed decisions and not chasing every idea that crosses my mind down the proverbial rabbit hole. These days, aside from the invaluable help of my leadership team, I have a process for identifying good ideas—and it’s a lot more than just blurting them out and seeing what happens. With every idea, there are four questions I ask myself, courtesy of a team member:

1. Will it make us better (i.e. more profitable, more attractive to active/prospective clients)?
2. How will we know if it’s successful? What are our desired outcomes?
3. What direct investment, training, or headcount do we need to develop and test this idea?

If, after answering these questions, the idea still sounds worthwhile, then I take it to my leadership team. And since the idea has been given a little extra consideration, I’m able to provide the team with enough context to enable them to provide me with more relevant feedback and suggestions. Then, together with their input, we have the necessary perspective to proceed to the next step in the decision-making process by completing a detailed cost-benefit analysis.

Become an Approachable Idea Machine

It doesn’t matter whom you run your ideas past. It could be your own personal advisory board, a fellow entrepreneur, or other thought leaders. You may even want to talk it out with a larger company executive who may have tried something similar, or perhaps a finance or consulting company to help you run the numbers. Whomever you talk to, your goal is the same: to lay it all out and make the decision easy, one way or the other. Trust me: it’s better to prove an idea wrong than to implement a flawed concept.

At the end of the day, you’re still the one who makes the decisions, and you’re still the one who has to see it through. Until you execute, you’ll never know for sure whether your idea works. And if the idea doesn’t work, you will want to have your team stand with you. Otherwise, it’s not just your idea that’s in trouble, but your culture as well.

This has been adapted from Just Go With It. For more advice on entrepreneurship and business leadership, you can find Just Go With It on Amazon.

Mandy Gilbert is an entrepreneur, CEO, investor, and speaker. In 2002, she started Creative Niche—a recruitment firm specializing in advertising, digital, and marketing—with $8,000. Today, it brings in nearly $12 million in sales annually and has placed thousands of creative, digital, and marketing talent across North America. Mandy has been recognized as a United Nations Global Accelerator and has completed the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program. She lives in Toronto and is the proud mom of two busy boys, Isaac and Sam. Mandy is a weekly columnist for Inc.