Good ideas look harmless, but they’re downright dangerous. Every good idea steals time, attention, and energy from great ideas. The opportunity cost compounds silently until growth stalls.
Nobody is immune to the tyranny of good ideas, where projects sound reasonable but collectively paralyze progress. Not me, not you, not the best companies on earth. It’s terrifying how many good ideas we get up to at the expense of great ideas.
What makes good ideas enticing is that they seem easy. They look small in scope. They’re not a heavy lift. Who doesn’t want a quick win, right? Doesn’t it feel good to have someone say “good idea” in a meeting?
Forces are working against you to feed the never-ending list of good ideas:
Parkinson’s law, where work expands to fill the time available
Productive procrastination, where we avoid negative feelings about our primary task by doing less important work
Satisficing, where we choose the first option that feels “good enough” instead of the best
Shiny object syndrome, where we fear missing out on what’s trendy
AI lowers the barrier to generating ideas, making it feel deceptively easy to execute them
The result is meetings that constantly add more ideas, teams that confuse motion with progress, and leaders who reward chasing new ideas.
These forces are invisible, automatic, and relentless. Unless you design systems to counteract them, they'll keep you working on good ideas at the expense of great ones. Every business must fight good ideas, every hour of every day.
I’ve seen it firsthand: great ideas executed with full focus outperform 10 good ideas. It’s what separates winners from the rest. We see it inside companies, where 80% of the value often comes from a few products or services. We see it in markets where a few firms capture 80% of the value.
Great ideas need competing priorities removed to get the time and focus they need. They need the smaller boats tied up so they can leave the harbor.
To make way, we need to face a hard truth: standard business practices are additive when they should be subtractive.
When was the last time you had a meeting designed to cut 80% of the ideas you’re working on? If the answer is never, you have a problem. In our firm, prioritizing our work for the week is core to our weekly team sync. We’re getting better at it, but I wager we could be more ruthless.
When was the last time you used AI to force-rank your ideas by 90-day revenue impact? I’m testing this with my own work, and it’s been surprisingly clarifying to get brutally honest feedback.
Give it a try. The honesty might sting, but the clarity is worth it.