Under the old tribal system, the tribal assembly elected a chief in case of an external threat, to lead the defense effort, and it was a temporarily granted authority.
"There are 20 million other people on Monster.com," said Mr. Curtis, who chats up his fares in case a chief executive or headhunter has stumbled in.
In one case, a chief executive officer, who was troubled by the aggressiveness and sometimes outright rudeness of one of his talented vice presidents, used various indirect methods such as group meetings and hints from outside directors to avoid dealing with his subordinate.
Both the White House and the F.B.I. denied an article in The Washington Times yesterday that asserted that investigators had identified a chief suspect in the case who had learned how to make a weapons-grade strain of the deadly anthrax bacteria at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., and had twice been fired from government jobs.
The schemes reviewed were often high-level conspiracies; in more than four out of ten cases, a management-level employee paid or authorized the bribe, and in twelve per cent of the cases a chief executive was directly involved.
A manager, by definition, has formal authority over an organizational unit, whether that be a whole organization in the case of a chief executive or a division, department, or branch, and so on, in the case of a manager within the hierarchy.
"It's often the case that a chief executive will be associated with a company.
But Ms. Palin is busy enough that she needs such a chief of staff in any case.
The J.Crew case rewards a chief executive for his poor conduct, letting him keep the company without real penalties except reputational damage.
It is often the case that a chief executive who turns around the business and saves it from failure is not the chief executive to build it up again.
"It's absolutely a keeping-up sort of thing," said Mr. Kalenderian, who described the customer for all this excellence -- usually an investment banker or a chief executive but in any case rarely a middle manager -- as "beyond valley of the dandy".
