The difference between “doing the right things and doing things right” is one of those phrases that has been stuck in my head for a long long time.

The way I originally heard/learned it was connected to the idea that you had to know when to do each, and that usually it was first important to do the right things (ie get going even if things aren't perfect) but that at some point it became urgent to actually do things right (deliver full quality or potential).

The prevailing wisdom has long been that in business you have to execute to perfection to really win. But in reality you’re better off doing a poor job delivering something that people really want, than a great job at something in which they have little or no interest.

The entire internet has largely been an example. It was initially slow and painful, with limited content and dropped connections – but people came in droves. Remember the first year of online video at the size of a postage stamp? MP3 files largely killed hi-fidelity because small and transportable made ‘audio resolution’ far less important. And online shopping is the king of them all – a very difficult process and often frustrating experience in the early years (and sometimes today) yet compound growth at 25%+ per quarter or more for years on end.

When recently reading some of the classic marketing books, I was struck by how it seemed many online marketers where fighting up-hill battles because they hadn’t stopped to consider or implement sound marketing principles. They were just rushing around buying keywords or optimizing pages and then considering their results only in light of the quality of their keyword buying or landing pages – they didn’t stop to consider that maybe their product was unappealing, their pricing was uncompetitive, or their value proposition was poorly communicated.

There’s a term I heard once and have never been able to find again – maybe it’s terminal point – which is the name for the point in time when a plane is definitely going to crash although it hasn’t yet hit the ground. In other words, after that point, there is nothing that can be done because prior actions have sealed fate (mathematically). There can be a terminal point in business too, when there is no keyword or promotion that is going to save you.

Seth made me think about all this with his post on strategy vs tactics.