Doing the Right Things is More Important than Doing Things Right | Hacker News Reader

Doing the Right Things is More Important than Doing Things Right

bothsidesofthetable.com

26 pointswheels8 comments

It's hard to argue with anything the author wrote. It's all reasonable and makes sense.

However, I believe that he implies a false dichotomy. I believe that both "do the right thing" and "do things right" are important. I believe that one of the keys to success is to synthesize top-down and bottom-up thinking together.

I believe that you need a supple mind or organizational culture that can ping-pong between the "big picture" and the "devil is in the details" repeatedly and quickly. By doing so, I believe you can do quick sanity checks to ensure that the big picture is practical. It also allows ensures that you don't waste time on unimportant details.

I have no proof this beyond of own experience. :-)

Ideas making sense has nothing to do with ideas being valid. You are correct that doing the right thing and doing things right are both important. What good is it to do the right thing if you do it really bad? I think he makes an implied assumption that if you're doing the right thing you are doing it right. You need both in order to operate best which makes the entire comparison moot. If you have no balance the next thing to expect is an article touting doing things right is more important than doing the right thing.

Both are important, but doing the right thing is a prerequisite for doing that particular thing right.

If A, B, and C are the keys to success, I may be able to succeed by doing a mediocre job on A, B, and C, but there's no way I can succeed by not doing A, B, and C, even if I do an excellent job on D, E, and F.

"Everybody should be able to answer the question, “why am I doing this?” Otherwise they’re likely to be doing things right, but not the right things."

This deserves more attention. While it is certainly critical to the point the author makes, I think it goes beyond far that. With every employee being able to answer the question "why am I doing this?" clearly you can achieve a far greater sense of accomplishment among your staff. This has positive side-effects for much more things.

I respect how the author has articulated the problem, but the solution I was hoping he would articulate equally as well never came, other than a few simple platitudes in the last paragraph.

Reminds me of the Jack Nicholson line in the movie "As Good as it Gets" - "I'm drowning here, and you're describing the water!"

If you are interested in solving the problem described, check out Steve Blank's entry on "Mission, Intent and Values":

http://steveblank.com/2009/04/09/supermac-war-story-6-the-jo...

You may do Bingo Card Software brilliantly, A/B test everything down to the core, but in the end, no matter how brilliant it is, it's still just Bingo Card Software, and the market is limited.

If you pick something else with a much larger upper bound (like a game or so), when you spend all the time optimizing, you'll expand and expand your audience, and make more and more money.

This looks like a variation on the same theme as the PG "procrastination" essay. Sometimes you're doing unimportant things (you may do them right, though, and they can be somewhat useful anyway) instead of doing really important things (the right thing).

I always heard this as "It's better to have a 70% plan and execute it 100% than to have a 100% plan and execute it 70%."

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