This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Nearly every aspiring entrepreneur or innovator has a business plan, and virtually all of these individuals believe that their business plan -- what we call Plan A -- will work. They can probably even imagine how they'll look on the cover of Fortune or Inc. And they are usually wrong. But what separates the ultimate successes from the rest is what they do when their first plan sputters. Do they lick their wounds, get back on their feet and morph their new insights into great businesses, or do they stick to their original plan? If the founders of Google, Starbucks or PayPal had stuck to their original business plans, we'd likely never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical changes to their initial models, became household names and delivered huge returns for themselves and their investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a business model that worked? Why did they succeed when most new ventures crash and burn?

Like every other ambitious, Ivy League-educated baby boomer, Randy Komisar wanted to climb the corporate ladder--any corporate ladder. But he just couldn't bring himself to play the traditional career game. Instead, Komisar made up his own rules, taking a series of jobs that sparked his passions and made him happy--and successful. Today, the charismatic 45-year-old is a "virtual CEO"--an off-site but supercharged consultant to flesh-and-blood CEOs at a number of start-up companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. But that was only after he'd worked his way through 11 companies in 25 years--a crazy quilt of jobs as a music promoter, corporate lawyer, CFO at a software start-up, and chief executive at a video game company, just to name a few. Komisar's success came by not having a career--at least, not in the traditional old-economy sense of the word. He realized there were alternatives to marching your way straight up the corporate ladder and that success in the new economy can involve a series of twists and turns. In this first-person account, Komisar describes why a nontraditional career path such as the one he unintentionally took may appeal to more businesspeople than might suspect it themselves. He tracks his professional journey along a sometimes tense, often enlightening, and ultimately prosperous course. He shares lessons learned along the way. Komisar also makes a strong business case for pursuing the passion-driven career; such a career, he says, makes supreme sense in the new economy because it's flexible and challenging--both for an individual and for the companies he chooses to work for.