Business myths worth studying

Here's a smart post (via PhotoMatt) by Ron Garret, with many smart comments as bonus goodness: Top ten geek business myths.

This excerpt, I think, applies to all kinds of planning, not just business planning:

"As Carl Sagan was fond of saying, prophecy is a lost art. There is no way to know for sure how much money your business is going to make, or how much it will cost to get to market. The reason for doing financial models is to do a reality check and convince yourself that making a return on investment is even a plausible possibility. If you run the numbers and find out that in order to reach break-even you need a customer base that is ten times larger than the currently known market for your product then you should probably rethink things. As Dwight Eisenhower said: plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.

"This myth is the basis for one of the most classic mistakes that geeks make when pitching their ideas. They will say things like 'Even if we only capture 1 percent of the market we'll make big bucks.' Statements like that are a dead giveaway that you haven't done your homework to find out what your customers actually want. You may as well say: there's a good chance that only 1 customer in 100 will buy our product (and frankly, we're not even sure about that). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence."

It also doesn't pass the dumbass test.