"Firing" Yourself

Here's a productive mental exercise and not just for CEOs: firing yourself (in your mind), then asking what your replacement would do:

To test his own decision making, Mr. Fraizer regularly fires himself -- at least in his own mind. It's a tactic he learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove in his 1996 book, "Only the Paranoid Survive." When Intel's memory-chip business was getting battered by Japanese rivals in the 1980s, Mr. Grove asked Intel co-founder Gordon Moore: "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?"

Mr. Moore answered that a new CEO would get Intel out of the memory-chip business.
"Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?" Mr. Grove retorted. He then did just that, reshaping Intel from a memory-chip producer to a microprocessor maker.

Read the entire CareerJournal article here.