>>>In my experience those who actually rise tot he top levels of MOST companies are highly intelligent, communicative people with a strong desire to make things better.<<<

Yowza! Amos, what planet are you living on? Sounds like a nice place.

I spent 5 years as an editor of corporate documents, mostly written by Canadian CEOs. Prior to that experience, I thought such people were greedy and evil, but very smart and good at what they did. After seeing the gobbledygook they spewed out of their word processors, I realized that, not only were they greedy and evil, most of them were illiterate and incompetent too. Half of them left their "Marketing Strategies" blank and left me (a freelance editor with no experience in business and fairly radical left-wing politics) to come up with a strategy for them. The client for whom I worked on sub-contract used to tell me to just "make something up" and "wing it".

Now, happily, I just write about folklore. Doesn't pay much, but it doesn't make me crazy either.

To quote Rhett Miller (who's kinda folky in an alt.country kind of way):

"This is what I do ... for a living!"

Cheers, Hester ... and geez, looks like I'll have to check the National at 11pm and see what old Jean actually said. So far, he's shown a surprising amount of backbone for a weasley Liberal (plus some tricky subterfuge).