You fall in love with your plan, and love is blind. You don’t see the fatal flaw.
I know a man who jumped headfirst into a new venture based on building a chain of used CD stores. The punch line? It was 2000. Napster was already there. Do you see the fatal flaw? He didn’t. And this was a man who’d had a string of successes. 
Love is blind.
So here’s a trick that might, sometimes, if you’re lucky, help you see the fatal flaw.
- It takes imagination. So close your eyes, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
- Jump in your imagination to the future. Go to three years from now.
- Now pretend that, there in the future, you know that the business you are starting now, your baby, your dream, is over. It failed. I know, that’s hard, but it’s a game; it’s only in your imagination, so make that leap.
- You’re sitting at a table, maybe in a coffee shop, maybe at lunch, and somebody asks you: “What happened? Why did it fail?”
- Now, using your imagination, your intelligence and what you know about your business, answer that question. This is fiction now, so you have to tell a story. Make it believable. What happened?
This helps you think about flaws. Was it competition? Did the management lose interest? Was there not enough money? Did some new technology come in?
I don’t know for sure, but I believe that if my friend with the used CD stores had done this exercise, he would have come up with the possibility of a change in the way we deal with music, meaning Napster, downloading, iTunes and so on.
And, for the record, I haven’t done the research, either, but what do you think? Would you like to own a used CD store? What do you think has happened to the sale of used CDs?
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
