This is a common problem in many companies: executives who do not have deep knowledge of the company's fundamental business, but rather in some support area, rise to the top of the business, and proceeed to make bad decisions about that business (through lack of deep understanding of the business' fundamentals). The exact same problem arises not just with support functions, but also with the belief in 'pure managers'. The biggest recent example of this problem in Boeing; the people running a business that is fundamentally an engineering business made some bad decisions in areas that were fundamentally engineering. Car companies have displayed this disorder too. Which is not to say that such people _can't_ be effective leaders of such organizations; the classic example is James Webb, who 'ran' NASA from 1961 to 1968; he was originally a lawyer. I say 'ran' NASA because Webb was smart enough to understand the limits of his expertise, and he delegated all the technical decisions to his chief deputy, Hugh Dryden - who had started his career as an aeronautical scientist (a Ph.D in physics and mathematics). Noel