I disagree. My boss' idea of "succeed" is not the same as my idea. And I don't particularly believe that my boss' idea of success is good for the company in the

I disagree. My boss' idea of "succeed" is not the same as my idea. And I don't particularly believe that my boss' idea of success is good for the company in the long run either. My boss wants to look good to his bosses. As another example of why I claim you're wrong, let me give an example of a company I worked at for far too long. It was a small family run business that sold and serviced automobile radios. At that time, car manufacturers contracted that service out to hundreds of smaller repair shops. This was one of them. As part of their service program, a dealership could call up and request a radio to take care of a customer's problem. The radio would get shipped, the customer would get a call from the dealership to come by and swap it out. This way, there would be no hole in the dash, as most drivers would go insane if they didn't have some sort of radio (or CD or cassette) playing in their car. At least one dealership figured out how to game the system this company used (we figured that they ordered the top of the line radios to use as upgrades for the sales department). Consequently, they were stealing more than $1k/month of product from the company. Mostly it was due to crappy paperwork that ended up in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again. I came up with a simple VB/Access application that used a barcode reader and a barcode printer. I also made the mistake of using my own money to buy a PDA with built-in barcode reader (specifically, a Symbol SPT1500) and writing an app to track paperwork for the employees. The boss hated it because his wife hated it. She hated it because it would make her have to do things slightly differently. Furthermore, the boss also hated it because it showed a flaw in his business system, and he treated it as if it were a bad mark on himself: he looked bad, therefore he was a bad person (that was his psychological take on the matter). Between bad customers (the service department at that dealer wasn't the only crooked one), bad employees (at least one went into business for himself filling his garage with inventory before quitting), and a bad workflow system, he was losing between $50k and $150k per year that I could figure out. Anything that involves more than 1 human will involve politics. And academia isn't any better or worse than any other business when it comes to the stupid nonsense that humans do to each other.