First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.

I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

You can increase the odds of spotting the weak points in your approach if you really think about the end-to-end business model you plan to follow - how you plan to create, capture, and deliver value.

Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.