Samsung executives grasped that people did not want phones to replace cameras but simply wanted an additional, more information-rich means of mobile communication with friends and family.
Six weeks later, an epidemiologist with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in an e-mail to the boy's mother, accused Whole Foods executives of "grasping at straws and dragging their feet in an attempt to avoid doing a recall".
Although many older executives have grasped the power of the Internet age, and steered their companies to exploit it, most of them speak geek as a second language, rather than as the native tongue of one who has learnt it when young.
Even Microsoft's own senior executives struggle to grasp its growing empire.
But in some cases, executives failed to grasp the potential dangers partly because the risks were obscured, even to them, via off-balance-sheet programs.
A property boom gone wild; opaque financial systems (if bank executives can't grasp the complexities of their business, they must be opaque); central banks supporting for years a policy of easy money; rampant short-selling.The only ingredients missing are the snide voice of the IMF denouncing bank nationalisations and the American trade representative demanding that weak banks go bust.
But newly released Fed documents and e-mail messages indicate that Fed officials became locked in a tense struggle with Bank of America last December, with Fed officials deeply skeptical about the competence of the bank's executives and their grasp of Merrill Lynch's financial condition.
At long, long last, we have a chief executive who grasps and forwards the essence of a self-governing people, the sovereign people who entrust the instruments of government to those serving in the executive and legislative branches.
Associates say Mr. Greenberg was the model of the imperial chief executive who failed to grasp an era of corporate reform.
One memorandum froze new regulations, which Andrew Rudalevige, a scholar of executive powers, told me any president would enact in order to get a grasp on the executive branch.
