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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS ‘I projected myself to age 80 and I looked back – already, I’m an optimist –
and I said, “What I want to have done at that point is to have minimised all
the regrets in my life.” I knew when I was 80 that I would never, for
example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus
. . . At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having
participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a
revolutionising event.”129

To apply the technique yourself, list the alternative ideas which you are
considering, order them in terms of your initial personal preferences,
and then construct a decision balance sheet for each option in the
format shown in Table 5.4, following the divergent and convergent
thinking processes described above. When you have created a ‘trial’
balance sheet for all options, review each again in turn to establish
whether your later thoughts can spark off any new ideas or insights.

Table 5.4 Decision balance sheet130

Positive anticipations Negative anticipations

Tangible gains and losses G G
for self: G G

Tangible gains and losses G G
for others: G G

Self-approval or self- G G
disapproval: G G

Social approval or G G
disapproval: G G

You should then review all the balance sheets and rank them in order
of scored preference. To what extent has the ranking order changed
since your intuitive first sort? If so, can you identify why?

The decision balance sheet provides a helpful, structured assessment of
alternative ideas from a personal perspective. It also highlights potential
problems which you may encounter during implementation – planning
how to overcome or at least mitigate these problems is the process
which we explore more fully in the following chapter, using techniques
such as reverse brainstorming and force-field analysis.

criteria to use within the frameworks The criteria to

use within the various evaluation and selection frameworks can be
separated into two broad categories: those which are business-focused