@swetland Oh for sure. It's that mental image of "being the guy in the corner office on the 100th floor, with his feet up on the desk saying 'damn it's good to be me'" as a vision of professional success.

To most of us with at least a small streak of artisan to our natures, we know those kinds of execs do exist in real life and are unenviable, useless people. Only some small scraps of that image are aspirational, like pay and maybe the view from up there. But there is a type of guy who doesn't see this as an embarrassing thing to daydream, or the parallel to - for example - the way that Trump can be described so accurately as "a poor person's idea of a rich person." If you yearn to be an underling's idea of an executive, running a team of agents is probably a very satisfying simulation of those middle-management fantasies.