Ten things VPs never say

Scott Berkun posts about Ten things VPs never say, including: "Team A is more important than Team B," "the CEO and I disagree" (Leaders fear showing dissention, despite signs for those paying attention), "My morale is low," "I’m ending project X and here’s why," "No, I don’t want to be on the cover of Time." (To want to be a VP requires an ego. No person in the history of the corporation has been forced, at gunpoint, into executive status.)

All this entertainment aside, I've known a few nice VPs, especially at Mathworks (hi Roy if you're reading). (And I bet my new CEO would have said some of them as a VP, which is why I like him.)

[Updated to add: A VP reader of Berkun's blog took offense politely and Scott apologized for the stereotyping. One of the interesting things this VP cited was Joel's article The Development Abstraction Layer, about the infrastructure of management that enables delivering code to the customer, and the complexity of making it work well. It certainly made me think about the Design Abstraction Layer, and if/how that works -- but by Joel's analysis it's just a layer in the development management problem, which may in fact be correct thinking. Go read and see what you think.]