Ideas are worth nothing unless you execute

Jeff Atwood wrote that you should cultivate your teams suggesting that the ability to execute on your idea is as or more important than the idea itself.

Today at the office, leadership shared the vision of our product roadmap. While very exciting and motivating, some of my colleagues feel the ideas are nothing new. They aren’t. Many of us have discussed the same ideas time and again over the past several years. Corporate myopia and lack of focus for the efforts of a lot of smart people prevented us from forming the right teams to execute. Now that we have support from the very highest levels in the corporation and are beginning to organize in ways to provide focus, it is time for us to execute.

Power in the way of Progress

Kelly French wrote yesterday about Why Extreme Programming Fails.  He made an interesting observation that caught my eye about human nature.  He drew a correlation between why Continuous Integration is scoffed at and law #11 from The 48 Laws of Power.

I believe in Continuous Deployment as Timothy Fitz writes about and IMVU, Flickr and others practice.  I am itching to implement the bits necessary to flush out defects early and prevent major problems later at work.  I guess the “Laws” keep getting in the way, though.  I wanted to believe people just needed some time to understand the concept and might slowly come around.  After reading the “Laws”, however, they may just be trying to hold on to power.

I guess I need to change my tact.  Now… how to do that?