Lou Rodarte and I have been discussing the value of an under-rated life skill: How to smell a rat.
This may be an inherited ability although we suspect it is acquired via many trips, as they say, around the block. There are subtle whiffs that may escape a less experienced nose that an accomplished rat-sniffer will catch without pause. A word added or omitted, a slight change of emphasis, a paragraph with a seemingly invisible footnote, something asked for or not asked for: all can be identified and given proper meaning by those of us with scars.
After some time in the field, you can spot the dodges both because you've seen them before and because you now possess the ability to think, uh, like a rat. The greatest of rat-detectors know the course of action before the rat does. They can choreograph the play.
To my mind, that is an essential skill for any chief executive.
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