It is that time of the year again: time to look back over the last 365 days, admire your accomplishments, cringe at your failures and plan for the new year.

Did you learn anything in 2006? Do you have what it takes to succeed in '07 or are you and your team ready for a hard landing? Business 2.0 is offering advice from 50 well-known, successful people. Gagglescape.com brings you eleven of the best. These are people who recognize that successful businesses need people power and innovative ideas in order to rise to the top. How do you get innovative? Take a look at my story on the key lessons of innovation. After you've done that read through what these eleven success stories have to offer:

Sergey Brin
Co-founder, Google
SUCCEED WITH SIMPLICITY

Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder, Myspace
KEEP SOCIAL NETWORKS SOCIAL

Chad Hurley
Co-founder, YouTube
GIVE YOUR STARTUP A FIGHTING CHANCE

1. Test first. Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback. As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want. Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, we saw an opportunity to protect the labels' rights and create a new market. Now we can do things like add music to people's travel videos. It allows users the freedom to create and to do it legally.

Kevin Rose
Founder, Digg
LET THE USERS RUN THE SHOW
Letting users control your site can be terrifying at first. From day one we were asking ourselves, "What is going to be on the front page today?" You have no idea what the system will produce. But stepping back and giving consumers control is what brought more and more people to the site. They have a sense of ownership and discovery at the same time. If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.

We have 17 employees, and we have 4,500 submitted stories a day. We could hire more staff, but that's not what the site is about. It's about allowing users to define the site and police the site themselves.

Eric Schmidt
CEO, Google
SUCCEED WITH SIMPLICITY
Silicon Valley companies have a tendency to develop these systems that rely on complexity. But it produces things like the personal computer running Windows. Google from the beginning focused on the simple search box, the simple search page.

Stephen Covey
Vice Chairman, FranklinCovey; Author, The 7 habits of Highly Effective People
STRIVE FOR MORAL AUTHORITY
Most people define greatness through wealth and popularity and position in the corner office. But what I call everyday greatness comes from character and contribution.

Muhammad Yunus
Founder, Grameen Bank; Winner, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
SEEK BIG REWARDS IN SMALL IDEAS
Business today, as it is understood and defined in books, is something you do to maximize your profit. But that is only part of the story, and it's a part that makes human beings look like moneymaking machines, which is not a very noble description of a human being.

Vinod Khosla
Founder, Khosla Ventures
COMPEL INVESTORS TO GO GREEN
We have an energy crisis, a climate crisis, and a terrorism crisis - and all of them are tied to oil. Business needs to do something and do it now. We have to find solutions and alternatives to fossil fuels, and only those that are economically driven will achieve sufficient scale.

Fred Wilson
Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
BUILD A BLOG THAT BUILDS YOUR BUSINESS

Stewart Butterfield
Co-founder, Flickr
IT HAS TO BE ABOUT MORE THAN JUST MONEY

Malcolm Gladwell
Author, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference
BE WILLING TO CROSS THE AISLE
I think we have lost touch in the United States with the ability to build coalitions and compromise. The truth is that not a lot divides Democrats and Republicans. But to hear them talk, you'd think they were Bolsheviks and monarchists, and this was Russia in 1917 and not America in 2006. Cooperation and conciliation and compromise and teamwork are all arts, and like all arts they require practice and commitment. In a complex world, success is not possible without teamwork.