A supervisor of mine once admonished me, "It's okay to be honest, but you don't have to be "brutely" honest." Never quite figured it out.

Ellis

Ellis,
Having an MBA, I think that I know what your supervisor was saying. My opinion is that too many businessmen of today, such as possibly your supervisor, must have been asleep when business ethics was being discussed at length in graduate school! It very well could be that such an attitude contributed greatly to our recent near financial collapse of U.S. economy.