Friends and former associates describe him as a decent, solid executive who maintains a positive outlook no matter how bleak the situation.
Grant, by Jean Edward Smith (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $20), takes issue with Ulysses S. Grant's reputation as a weak, scandal-plagued president, arguing that he "was not only a great general and a great writer but a decent chief executive as well," Richard Brookhiser wrote here in 2001.
In "Grant, Jean Edward Smithh, a political scientist at Marshall University and biographer of John Marshall, takes on this large and misshapen reputation, and argues that the 18th president was not only a great general and a great writer but a decent chief executive as well.
Even when they had decent numbers, executives struggled to manage their mutinous staff.
But so long as the world economy grows at a decent rate, executives will in 2006 start to unleash what Keynes famously called their risk-taking "animal spirits".Their caution, until now, is understandable.
The wholly unfunny first half-hour sees Julianne Moore walk out on her husband, a dull, decent Californian insurance executive (Steve Carell), father of their 13-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter.
"A well-executed, decent idea is better than a poorly-executed, excellent idea," says Gerald Shreiber, founder and chief executive of J&J Snack Foods.
A few of the top-range Audis will give today's executive a decent kneading.
As a decent, law-abiding retail executive said with a glass of vodka in his hand and a sparkle of epiphany in his voice, "Something is happening".
We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own.
