How Much Confidence Is Too Much?Being sure of yourself is nice, but thinking that nobody knows better is a mistake.

Being right feels awesome. There's nothing quite like discovering that you had an idea or made a decision that didn't just work--it rocked. But while ending up in the right is lovely, stubbornly refusing to give up on being right is not good for business. Just ask Jeff Booth, president and CEO ofBuildDirect, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based retailer of flooring and other building materials. He's been there.

Booth and business partner Robert Banks launched BuildDirect at just the right time. It was 1999; the dot-com boom was on and home sales were on the upswing--big time. They built solid relationships with suppliers, skipping the middleman and passing savings on to consumers. The company took off quickly, growing from a kitchen-table operation to an international success.