Many years earlier, Charlie had orchestrated a well-planned campaign to seize what he expected would be an important and prominent segment of a neglected market-neglected because other vendors didn't think there was much profit in it. Their instincts and common sense told them that this market had no future. Charlie decided that common sense was not so common.

He felt that the competitors were wrong, but he was careful. He didn't want to charge ahead and commit heavy financial, engineering and marketing resources to a product line that other companies thought would be a sink hole. Charlie disagreed, but he knew enough not to trust his own instincts. Maybe the competitors were right. He decided to test.

He started with some focus groups to learn how engineers felt about his planned product. He learned what they liked and what they didn't like. He learned about potential pitfalls. He learned how to promote and market the product most effectively. He learned how to highlight the product's power in solving a problem that many experts thought was insoluble.

Based on what he learned at the focus groups, Charlie modified the product, then tested again to learn how engineers felt about the product that would result from their early input. Finally, he launched the product and it was an instant success. Indeed, it was a long-lasting success and the mainstay of Charlie's very profitable business for many years.

And now Charlie was ready for the next leap in his successful career. He was going to launch a successor product that would make the competitive unit obsolete before it got off the ground. Fred warned Charlie about some dangerous pitfalls and recommended the kind of research that, years earlier, had made for a highly successful product. He pointed to very specific weak spots that weren't immediately obvious and warned that competitors would seize on those weaknesses to defeat the product.

But this time, still flush with the memory of his early success, Charlie felt no need to test. His intuition told him he had another winner. And his intuition, he told everybody, was never wrong.

He launched the "new and improved" product and it was a disaster. Competition quickly found its Achilles' heels and seized Charlie's market-just as Fred had predicted.

Charlie knew just what to do. He fired Fred.