D&B: And everything comes crashing down on the board and the management.

Palmieri: That's right The culture in these kinds of companies is usually a reflection of the style of the chief executive. If the chief executive is reasonably open, chooses strong people around him, encourages questions, or if the board is strong enough to require access to hard information and to ask hard questions, it's possible to create a culture in which even the most authoritarian executives succeed in building impressive records of growth and profit Not by a long shot do all authoritarian leaders wind up leading their company into bankruptcy. You can think of many who succeed very well. They may be geniuses, and geniuses are hard to account for. They may be lucky and that's hard to account for. But when you look at Penn Central or Baldwin-United, or perhaps any one of the great corporate disasters in the past 10 years, when people ask how they happened, you see a distinguished group of directors who had been aboard during the period in which the company went into decline and finally into crisis. You see that that group of directors essentially didn't understand or were paralyzed to take any effective action in the circumstances long before the crisis arose. And so I believe that the corporate culture which restricts dissent and restricts hard questions is ultimately the cause of much of the problem.