He thought he might be able to report, honestly, that revenues were setting records. If pressed, he would confess that he really didn't know the details, that he was too busy with strategic matters to bother with minutiae. However, if top management demanded details, he might have to report that the records were record lows. Thanks to layoffs, formerly called downsizing, then resizing, then restructuring and now fine-tuning, new products were scarce. Or they were older products with a face-lift.

Despite heavy promotion extolling the company's devotion to customers and its extensive line of solutions, customers weren't showering Charlie with orders. In fact, many potential customers didn't even know what the company made-other than solutions. And they weren't quite sure about how these solutions might fit into their circuit and system designs.

Charlie had always been a very popular fellow, so he had long felt that customers would accept almost anything he tried to sell. But that didn't work for very long. Without realizing it, he had been depending on the law of conservation of credulity-the dispelling of one illusion leaving a vacuum that draws in another.

Charlie wondered if he could blame someone else, some subordinate he would fire for destructive practices that Charlie knew nothing about. Then he would report his great success in uncovering the culprit and taking prompt, masterly action, action that would highlight his bold executive strength. Charlie, this would demonstrate, was a man of action.

He remembered the tale of the tech-support engineer on the rifle range who kept missing the target. He finally tested his rifle by firing a round at the ground and, seeing a puff of dust, shouted to the fellow manipulating the target, "It's working here; you must be doing something wrong at your end." But Charlie feared that the executives who were to hear his presentation might lack a suitable understanding of the situation.

Then, suddenly, an epiphany-a revelation that brightened his day. Charlie took inspiration and guidance from the words of the president of the United States. Seeing the country at war, the economy reeling, massive unemployment despite tax relief for the rich, a painful stock-market slump, a magical transformation of a budget surplus to an impending deficit that would plague future taxpayers, and a massive terrorist danger that eluded expensive ordnance in the sky, President Bush reported that "the state of our union has never been stronger."

Charlie was elated.