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I am the living, breathing personification of the dotcom economy. For one year, I ruled the world. But in a few swift, brutal months, my whole world collapsed.

I was the chief executive of Handheld Corp., which manufactures and markets three lines of handheld electronic devices based on the Palm OS. Four years ago, when I signed on as CEO, Handheld was a $750 million company. The previous year, two of its product lines, the X5 and X6, racked up total profits of $170 million. But its new line for the consumer market, the X7, was $10 million in the red. And the Big Three of handheld computing -- Palm, Handspring, and Research In Motion (makers of the BlackBerry) -- were gobbling up market share.

Handheld Corp. clearly needed a change at the top. But unlike those overvalued dotcoms, Handheld was making money. I knew I could ride that rocket to Mars.

Coming out of the gate, I made all the right moves. I slashed the X5's wholesale price (from $250 to $225) and dropped its R&D budget by 3%. I held the price steady on my upscale X6 and bumped up its R&D by 1%. And I didn't give up on the X7: I cut its price (from $200 to $180) and goosed its R&D by 3%.

Profits shot up for all three lines. By year's end, I had pushed Handheld across that magic, billion-dollar threshold ($1.4 billion in revenue, to be precise). My board went bananas. And the Street showed us the money -- big-time.

Then it all came crashing down -- thanks to a single mistake. The next year, I decided to milk the X5. I held its price and dropped its R&D by 5%. The result: Customers hated the new version. Sales sank; margins vanished. Our overall numbers were dismal. The Street pummeled us.

I tried to rescue the X5 -- I nicked 5 bucks off the price and bulked up R&D by 8%. Too late. Once burned, customers never returned. Sales and profit went into free fall. Finally, I dropped the line. But with just two products in the market, we lost $200 million in revenue. I was relieved when the board finally axed me. Now I could get out of this nutso world and go back to my day job.

You Too Can Be Carl Yankowski

No doubt you've already figured out that I was a virtual CEO, Handheld Corp. was vapor, and I made up the stuff about Wall Street and the company's board of directors. But the numbers were real. They were calculated -- based on my market moves -- by PDA Sim, an online simulation exercise developed by Forio Business Simulations. Led by two MIT grads, Forio develops and uses simulations to help companies and managers nail their BHAGs -- big, hairy, audacious goals.

In an email, Will Glass-Husain, Forio's CTO, explained: "Successful business people need to translate knowledge of their company's strategy into effective action. One good way to translate rules into action is to build an intuition about strategy by having fun. Having fun lets people focus less on the individual tasks and get into the spirit of the strategy. Simulations compress time and space, so that managers build an intuition about effective decision making that could take years to accumulate in real life."