[phugoid]

What impressed me is how they overcame their age and the size of their business to compete with the big players, through meticulous hard work and unscrupulous social engineering.

With better ethics, I would love to have someone like that on my team:

"Diveroli knew how to win them over with a mixture of charm, patriotism and a keen sense of how to play to the military culture; he could yes sir and no sir with the best of them. To get the inside dirt on a deal, he would call the official in charge of the contract and pretend to be a colonel or even a general. "He would be toasted, but you would never know it," says Packouz. "When he was trying to get a deal, he was totally convincing. But if he was about to lose a deal, his voice would start shaking. He would say that he was running a very small business, even though he had millions in the bank. He said that if the deal fell through he was going to be ruined. He was going to lose his house. His wife and kids were going to go hungry. He would literally cry. I didn't know if it was psychosis or acting, but he absolutely believed what he was saying."

[exit]

what's left when you subtract lack of ethics?

[cheez]

If you ask me, their ethics were an extension of the USG.