Your Ideas Aren't That Valuable
What Emeril Lagasse, Moneyball, and great organizations teach us about competitive advantage.
BAM! In a storied career, that catchphrase is the thing Emeril Lagasse is most well known for.
But back in 1993, Lagasse wasn’t necessarily all that well known for anything. A rising chef who had opened his first restaurant a few years earlier, Lagasse was on a strong but typical path to becoming one of the top chefs in the South.
Then he made a curious choice: Lagasse took his best recipes and published them in a cookbook, Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking. And if that wasn’t enough, he doubled down and started talking about his recipes and techniques on television, hosting How to Boil Water on the Food Network.
Many chefs would be scared to share their secrets. Not Emeril. He knew the recipes were never the reason for his success.
In most businesses, people guard ideas as tightly as possible.
Professional sports are rife with NDA’s and non-competes for this very reason. No one wants to share a single secret. Even within organizations, few people have access to all the data and information. Everything is on a need-to-know basis.
If you attend a smaller conference where they open up presentations for questions, you’ll rarely see someone working for a team raise their hand. A mere question might give away some strategic knowledge.
And teams aren’t happy when others share ideas, either. Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein was famously upset with Billy Beane when he heard that Michael Lewis was writing a book about the A’s and the use of statistics to identify undervalued baseball players.1 Epstein said, “I can’t believe Billy is letting him write this book. He’s going to give everybody the same idea. He’s handing out the blueprint.”2
That blueprint, seemingly, is to find a competitive advantage and exploit it as long as possible. But if an edge depends on a single idea that can never get out, it’s not much of an edge, is it?
Success rarely hinges on one big idea.
Even being first — one of the benefits of secrecy — is overrated. Apple didn’t have the first mp3 player. Google wasn’t the first search engine. Amazon didn’t invent online retail.
Winning frequently comes down to execution. Ideas alone have little value. What’s more important is the effort and coordination required to put an idea into practice.
The best organizations take it even further. They don’t hunt for some singular advantage. They rely on their ability to consistently generate and implement new ideas. They trust their people, their processes, and their culture. And they understand that being open about what they’re doing enables learning and attracts like-minded people to join them.
When Moneyball was written, every team had the same knowledge about the value of on-base percentage. And yet, teams like the A’s and the Red Sox stayed good because that insight wasn’t the reason they’d been winning. They looked at the game differently and asked different questions.
A team that loses its advantage because an idea got out has no one to blame but themselves. Secrets don’t keep forever. Employees leave, information spreads, and competitors catch up.
Even in the rare instances where that’s not the case, organizations are stuck clinging to what’s worked in the past rather thinking about what comes next.
Fear — in any form — actively undermines creativity, innovation, and learning. The fear that ideas will get out is no exception. Any energy spent on protecting an advantage is energy better spent finding a new one.
Confident people don’t stress about information getting out. Confident organizations don’t guard every process. They essentially say, “Just because you know what we know doesn’t mean you can do what we do.”
Emeril realized early in his career that a list of ingredients and directions didn’t make him who he was. His charisma, hospitality, drive, and creativity separated him from everyone else. And by the time someone read one of his recipes, he was already on to the next.
I would have had no qualms about granting access if there was some chance Brad Pitt would play me in a movie.
As detailed in Tom Verducci’s book about the 2016 Cubs, The Cubs Way.
I met Emeril many years ago at an event celebrating the release of his line of pasta sauces. When we shook hands and spoke, he was gracious and magnanimous. His charisma was undeniable. He made me feel like we were old friends, as if he had been staring back through the TV all those years I had been watching him. Like you’re saying, Andrew, his secrets aren’t found in his recipes, nor can they be copied or stolen.