"Ever had all your dreams come true, only to find yourself in the middle of a nightmare?" asked a wry acquaintance recently. In his case, he hand followed through on a lifelong dream starting his own advertising boutique. A careful planner, he had determined his own strengths and weaknesses and approached a fellow executive, with whom he had worked for almost five years, to shore up those areas in which he felt least effective.
"We've launched campaigns together, managed impossible clients, dealt with a capricious boss," my acquaintance said. "How much more difficult could it be to run our own show?"
The answer, needless to say, was a lot a lot more difficult to run, and a lot more difficult to deal with problems, especially those caused by his partner. "I feel as if we just struck an iceberg on our maiden voyage," he said. "Like the Titanic."