How the Rookie Crumbles Is your business off to a crummy start? Learn how facing your faults can put your business on a solid foundation.

As scientific studies go, it at first sounds ridiculous. Makingheadlines last year was the news that a doctoral student in Englandhad identified the "that" in the expression,"That's how the cookie crumbles." Qasim Saleem andhis colleagues at Loughborough University in Leicestershire,England, used a laser beam to follow tiny deformations that form asthe cookie picks up moisture near the edge and loses it near thecenter.

What follows are ruptures in the cookie that make it susceptibleto crumbling, causing the cookie to be prone to disaster evenbefore the customer reaches for it. The point of the research isthat cookie makers want to stop throwing up their hands and saying"That's how the cookie crumbles." They want to fixthe problem-and save immeasurable dollars in lost cookie revenue inthe process.

It's a good bet you never learned in Business 101 thatentrepreneurs are a lot like cookies. Like the cookie that hasfault lines somewhere in its sugar, shortening, flour and vanillaextract, every entrepreneur has some personal weakness inside allthose mitochondria and brain cells, a weakness that will affect howhis or her business is run.