Everyone knows someone who has come up with a good idea and who has not acted upon that idea. Or started working on the idea… and not finished.

Perhaps you can even personally relate to that.

People come up with good ideas for new businesses all of the time. Unfortunately, many of those ideas are never acted upon and most are never brought to market.

This is tragic, because it’s not a matter or whether or not we can. In 2010, an average person of average intelligence can come up with a good idea and bring it to market – thanks to a democratization of the tools of production, distribution and sales.

But not everyone will.

Why do you suppose that is?

Lessons Learned

I’ve made it my focus over the past 20 years to turn ideas into products and businesses. Most recently launching Spitter.com, and working with other companies such as Rivals.com, RealNetworks, Turner Broadcasting, Ustream.tv, and Zazzle to bring their revolutionary ideas to market.

What have I learned that can shed some light on what makes the difference in going to market with your ideas?

There will be obstacles along the way. Distractions. Problems. Frustrations. Doubters. Skeptics.

The single greatest way to overcome those obstacles is something often overlooked in execution: having a big enough reason why.

Big Enough Reasons Why

Chris Klaus, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Kaneva explains why this is so important.

“Part of the secret sauce of a successful startup, is finding a vision and mission that you and your team are passionate about,” Klaus told me. “Every startup has incredible challenges. The teams that are passionate about their mission will be determined to learn from their mistakes. They have the desire and energy to overcome these obstacles.”

Reasons why are the fuel that will get you to follow through.

Big enough reasons why can help get you through anything.

Pamela Slim, business coach and author of ‘Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Employee to Thriving Entrepreneur’ explains:

“Knowing why you are starting your business — how you will impact others, or even change the world — will fuel you through the inevitable periods of struggle as a first-stage entrepreneur,” Slim told me. “Your customers will feel the meaning and purpose behind your business, and your marketing position will be much stronger.”

What Do Most People Do Instead?

As entrepreneurs, we love our ideas – often to the point of irrational exuberance. And being excited about our ideas, we often focus so much on “what” we are doing (the product) that we don’t define - or we lose sight of – “why” we are doing it.

And without big enough reasons why to motivate us through the hard times, we’re more likely to get stalled – when we really need to be putting in the extra effort.

“The difference between success and failure might be the difference between calling it a day at 7 pm or midnight,” David Payne, founder of Atlanta-based Scoutmob, told me. “Only a strong mission will cause you to feel good about working those hard extra few hours.”

A Powerful Approach to Getting Important Things Done

Start by answering these time-tested four questions:

1) What is your desired outcome?

Most people answer: “I don’t know”. Perhaps that explains why so many ideas are never acted on.

Think about what your desired outcome is, what do you really want? And write it down. Be as specific as possible. Set a specific date for that outcome.

2) Why do you want that outcome?

The power is in why. When you get enough reasons you can do just about anything, you can find the way.

A big enough reason why is where you get your drive to follow through.

A useful way to frame this question is to think about why you must do it (as opposed to why you should do it). Think about what matters most to you, what do you most value?

For example: so you want to make a million dollars? Why? Dig deeper. Ultimately, what do you value most?

3) How am I going to make it happen?

Think about – and write down – the most important actions you need to take to accomplish your desired outcome.

Bonus: take it one step further. You are more than your to-do list. Think about and write down the answer to these questions. What kind of person would you need to become to accomplish your outcome? What skills would you need? And become that kind of person. Develop those skills.

4) How will I know when I’m getting my outcome?

Sometimes we can be winning – and feel like we’re losing – because we’re not keeping score. How will you measure it? How will you know?

Not All Reasons Why Are Created Equal

I’m not here to tell you which reasons are the right reasons for you. The “big enough reason why” is unique to each person. (Although some reasons that are often cited by aspiring entrepreneurs are misguided at best – and really bad reasons at worst – and I’ve written about them here.)

But the reasons that drive you could make the difference between success and failure.

What Have You Learned?

So, what do you want to remember from this article?

Before you get started with your to-do list, be clear about what it is you really want and why you want it.

You’ve got to be clear about your outcome and your purpose. The “why” is what will get you to follow through on your decision.

And as you’re bringing your idea to market, remember that Purpose = Power.

What do YOU think? What gives you your drive to follow through and launch new businesses and products? I’d love to hear about your experiences, in the comment section here.

Coming Next Week: Lessons for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, Part 2: “Goals Alone Are Not Enough”

I recently interviewed serial entrepreneur Brian Moore. Brian founded: Constructware (acquired by Autodesk for $46 million); Compliance 360 (ranked as one of America’s Fastest Growing Companies by Inc. Magazine); and most recently iglued.com.

In this video Q&A conversation, Brian talks about: lessons learned starting new businesses; why he does what he does; the one thing you MUST do to build your business; motivating partners; and about his newest startup, iglued.com.

(Disclosure: I have been an advisor to iglued.)

I interviewed the “Godfather of Videoblogging”, Steve Garfield, on the official publish date of his book, “Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business“. In this video Q&A:

• Steve talks about how he went from idea to market with his new book.
• Shares his advice for someone looking to get started with online video for their business.
• Reveals the mindset that enabled him to do the work on the book – without it feeling like work.
• Identifies the most important things you must do online for your personal brand.

In addition to knowing his stuff about online video, Steve is one of the nicest and most genuine people in social media, and he’s someone you should get to know.

What do YOU think? If you’re not already building your business with online video, what obstacles have been in your way? If you’ve already started, what are some of the key lessons you’ve learned?

I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, and with Apple’s scheduled iPod announcements today, here’s what Marissa had to say about Apple and Steve Jobs.

DAVID ECKOFF: I understand you admire Steve Jobs and Apple, how do you study and model Apple?

MARISSA MAYER: One of the things I do on the side of the Search Products business, is I run an associates program. I hire people right out of school with computer science degrees and teach them how to be good product mangers in the Google sense. Part of being a good product manager is being able to think and talk about and launch your products.

We do a series of field trips during the year and one of the field trips is to Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote in January where he unveils a lot of the products for that half of the year.

And it’s really interesting, because it’s almost like a football coach watching the opposing team and trying to break it down into X’s and O’s. On the bus back from San Francisco, we’ll break down, how did he talk about that, what worked, what was clever about it. A lot of insights can come out of that in terms of what can help build excitement about a product, what can build understanding.

There’s a lot of interesting insights the team has had into the way he talks about products and how he makes really complicated principles easily understandable.

DAVID ECKOFF: Are there any other companies you study who you think do a great job with innovation?

MARISSA MAYER: I think 3M is a great company where it is clear they do a lot to incent new innovation and ideas. We look a lot at start ups. How people are incented. How they guarantee a fast innovation cycle.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credits: Marissa Mayer: dfarber; Steve Jobs: Danny Novo

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: If you were to go to work at a company more mature in it’s lifecycle, what would be your approach to innovation and new product development?

MARISSA MAYER: I think a couple of things transcend. I think 20% time, letting your employees know that you trust them and that they’re empowered to work on the things that they think could have the biggest impact on the business or that they think could be most impactful for the world is an important idea and I think works largely everywhere.

And there are key elements that we look at in terms of overall metrics and trends that you want to coach the organization towards. One of them is small teams.

When I joined Google, there were 9 engineers and we organized in 3 teams of 3. And we knew we were going to add 9 engineers by year end, so there’d be 18 of us. And Larry and Sergey said, “You know what? By year end, we don’t want to have 3 teams of 6, we want to have 6 teams of 3. Let’s keep the core team at the size 3. Because if we have twice as many engineers, we don’t want to be doing all the same things twice as well, we want to be doing twice as many things.”

So there’s a conscious decision to sacrifice some element of quality and polish for the sake of doing more things and having more of a breadth of efforts going on.

The other nice benefit this has is it keeps the culture much more entrepreneurial and much more motivated. Because when you’re working on a smaller team you have a much greater sense of ownership. You’re not sitting there thinking, “If I don’t do X today, someone else will pick up the slack or it can wait for tomorrow.” Because it’s important enough for one of the 4 of you to do it. Or it’s not. So I think by creating a culture that has those small teams, you’re much more likely to get innovation.

That’s true in start ups, that’s true in large companies.

And then there’s the concept of leapfrogging. We’ve noticed that as Google has matured as a company, some teams, while they may be structured in smaller teams within them, they’re large teams. Our search team is a large team. We have more people working on search now than ever. The same is true for ads.

What we’ve noticed there is when we add a small disrupter team, that’s supposed to think about things in a new and different way, two bad things happen.

One, the large, experienced, mature team wants to talk with the disrupter team, and say, “I know that seems like a good idea, because it seemed like a good idea to us too. But we tried it, and it was a waste of a year. So please, don’t bother to do that. Skip that idea and move onto the next thing. So they’re trying to influence what the disrupter team does.

The other thing that happens is usually that big team is successful, and they have a lot of tools and infrastructure that the disrupter team wants to draft off of. So as a result, in a big company with a large successful team, it’s difficult for the disrupter team not to get sucked into the larger team over time.

So what we started doing as we rolled out leapfrog initiatives, we structure them organizationally and from a communication standpoint where they’re out of touch with the core team. They’re in a different reporting structure, a different engineering VP. And also physically diverse.

We’ve had a bunch of attempts at leapfrogs, such as in search, with a team in Kirkland trying to build a better search engine than Google itself. And I’m not allowed to talk with them [laughter]. And that’s a good thing, because I know they’re wasting time. I know they’re doing things we tried that just don’t work [laughter].

I’d love to talk with them and I’d love to save them that effort. But that very action of me doing that would ultimate change their outcome and change how disruptive they can be. So it’s really important that I not talk to the Kirkland search leapfrog and let them do their thing.

And who knows, maybe they’ll build a better search engine. But we do think that with a few years under their belt that they will have different features and different ideas that maybe could stand on their own and be stronger than Google itself. Or maybe it [the features] should be folded into the main search engine after they reach a level of maturity and have proven their value. We have similar efforts in Maps and Advertising.

Again, you want to keep a small team. But you also want a disrupter to be far enough away that they don’t get overly influenced or voluntarily pulled into the larger, more successful team.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: eirikso

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview last year with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’m publishing excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: Could you talk about the product management process at Google, how you go from idea to product, a high level overview?

MARISSA MAYER: Every product has its own genesis. But we gather ideas from all over the company. Some of the ideas are top down, us realizing we have strategic holes in what we’re offering our end users. A lot of the ideas are bottoms up, engineers and other employees coming up with ideas and prototypes of what they’d want to build.

From there, there definitely are phases of a product.

For example, a prototype at Google is worth 100,000 words. It’s one thing to talk to someone about an idea; it’s a whole other thing to be able to show a series of mock ups and/or a functioning website that illustrates your idea.

From there we try to put a small team on it, sometimes a volunteer effort with what we call 20% time. 20% time is a notion we have at Google that we want employees to work on whatever they want to work on regardless of it is part of their core assignment with about 20% of their time. So some of the times the prototype is developed voluntarily, other time by a small team. But generally it’s a couple of individuals who develop the prototype.
And then we launch it. We try to send it out to Google Labs as quickly as we can.

We try to launch early and often and then change the product, iterate it based on user feedback, adding more resources as something gains strength and popularity.

DAVID ECKOFF: What kind of return on investment do you see with 20% time?

MARISSA MAYER: We call it 20% time, that’s our slogan that provides our employees with a creative license to know they are empowered to spend 20% of their time to do whatever it is they feel most passionately about. Because we believe it is that kind passion that creates really great and beautiful products. At the end of the day it’s about building something that you think will be particularly powerful.

What we’ve found is that often supports the core and gives us a disproportionate return on investment.

Someone once asked me to quantify the outputs of 20% time, and I looked over our launch calendar which had all our historic launches for a 6 month period, tagging where the different ideas came from. And we realized over that 6 month period, over 50% of the products and features that had launched, came from 20% time. So it was disproportionate by a factor of about two and a half. So for us, it is very worthwhile.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: jwowens

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I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview with Marissa Mayer of Google last year, filmed before a live studio audience. Marissa leads Google’s product management efforts on search products. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, I’ll be publishing more excerpts of the interview on my blog.

DAVID ECKOFF: What cultural attributes makes Google special when it comes to innovating and developing new products?

MARISSA MAYER: People like to question the status quo and they like to think about doing things in new audacious ways. If the standard in the industry is to give away 4-6MB of mail space, let’s not make it 20 MB of space, let’s give them a gig.

Try to have big and audacious goals for how to do something and how to approach new problems. Larry and Sergey will talk about, as we start off new ideas within the company, we really want a new idea to have a billion dollar revenue run rate opportunity. That doesn’t mean we think about monetization all the time, what we really think about are the end users and what they ultimately want. But we want them to be big opportunities, things that really matter to people that they will use every day. Because when you work on really big important problems that matter and that are fundamentally useful to people’s everyday lives, you’ll find a way to monetize them. Either it will be so valuable that users will pay for a subscription and/or there will be a way to have advertising.

DAVID ECKOFF: Google has seen tremendous growth in the number of employees. How do you maintain the culture of the company?

MARISSA MAYER: I started when there were 18 people and now there are about 18,000 people. I think we were very lucky when we were small, the people we hired were all likeminded they were all interested in working on products that mattered they all wanted to do good things for the world and work on problems and projects that their friends and family would use every day. As a result, we had a very stable culture then.

As new hires come, you make small talk with new employees. I’d ask “What drew you to Google?” At around 1200 employees, I heard this interesting answer I’d never gotten before: “the culture.” I thought, that’s such an odd reason to go to a company. For me graduating from school and deciding to go to Google, it was about working on really interesting problems involving artificial intelligence and how it gets applied to search. It was the intellectual challenge that drew me to Google. So going for the culture seemed like an odd answer. But then I started hearing that answer all the time. And I noticed as we went from about 1200 employees to 1500 employees, almost 50% of the new people I talked with started citing the culture.

And I realized that the culture was having a very interesting reinforcing effect. There’s the point of maintaining stability up to 1200 employees. But once we hit 1200 employees, the culture became very self reinforcing. Because when you have a majority of employees joining a company for the culture, the last thing those employees want to do when they arrive is change it or screw it up. They came there to experience it, to participate in it, to benefit from it. And as a result, the culture has become very stable.

I think that what one of the most stunning things is how similarly motivated the early Googlers are to today’s Googlers. The conversations that happen every night around the foosball table or in the snack kitchens, you hear the same kind of aspirational language: what could Google do, what would be possible, what’s interesting in technology and how could we combine that with the infrastructure we’re building? What would be a big and audacious goal in this area? Those same conversations happen every night. The people who come now are inspired by the same principles that we had early on.

DAVID ECKOFF is President of Revolutionary Ventures, a consulting company that helps businesses create new growth through innovation. Previously, he was Vice President, New Product Development & Innovation at Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network); Senior Director at RealNetworks; and Senior Vice President at Rivals.com. He is currently developing two Web 2.0/new media businesses.

Photo credit: Esthr

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This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, I will be a judge for the semi-finals of the GRA/TAG 2008 Business Launch Competition.

Applicants, then semifinalists, then finalists are competing for a prize that includes a $100,000 cash award and services valued at an additional $200,000, for a total grand prize of $300,000.

This event is conducted by the The Georgia Research Alliance and the Technology Association of Georgia with the goal of supporting the creation and growth of new technology companies in Georgia.

In addition to the cash and services award, entrants have an option to work with a mentor to further develop and refine their business plan. A group of Georgia’s most successful high tech entrepreneurs has agreed to serve as mentors.

A preeminent panel of judges consisting of business leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists includes:

Semi Final Judges:

You may already be familiar with Keith Cunningham if you read the best selling business book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a lot of the info in that book came from Cunningham.

Related links: