Good news! My company has just invited you to have a seat on its Board of Directors. Congratulations!

Aside from the prestige that will now be showered upon you, you will of course be given some fabulous stock options as a form of compensation for your wisdom in steering our enterprise into a long and profitable future. Help us make the right decisions, and we’ll be farting through silk!

Now, I will be the first to admit that the stock has taken quite the beating over the past three or four years. There are a variety of complex reasons for this, of course, but it is our sincere hope that you refrain from digging too deeply into the myriad of actual factors that caused the temporary downfall. Instead, we have given you two brief reports; each asks you to blame the fall in price-per-share entirely on one of two departments. To make sure the process is fair, I have asked each of the two departments that might be on the chopping block to author the report of the other department you might wish to eliminate. Don’t worry; these reports won’t take very much of your valuable time to read. In fact, for your ease each department has condensed its “findings” into a few easy-to-remember catchphrases.

Oh dear, I’m already off agenda! Here I am going right into the blame game, before I’ve even gotten to the first and most important discussion point. (I’d lose my head if it weren’t attached – no wonder we called you in to help guide us!)

We recognize that assigning blame is less important than choosing the right new management team. This team is important, because we’ll need them to right our ship and steer us into Port Profitable, in the center of Big Money Bay, along the Coast of… hmmm… wait, I had something for this. Begins with “C.” Coast of Cash? Commodities? Calcium? Oh gosh, I can’t remember now. But trust me, it really hammered it home.

Anyway, our search committee has identified a few pretty fabulous candidates to take over as our Chief Executive Officer. We have prepared detailed resumes and reports on all of them. You’ll note that we have taken the liberty of distilling each candidate’s qualifications down to only the most relevant factors needed to manage a large, multi-faceted, global-reaching company like ours. To that end you will see the reports focus primarily on the following:

1. Political Party Affiliation

2. Religious Affiliation, along with our experts’ determinations on just how important that affiliation is to each candidate.

3. Marital Status, with special attention given to the spouse’s ability to make cookies. We also speculate on the chances that each candidate has dipped his pen, if you will, in someone else’s ink, if you catch my drift. (The pen is his penis!) Also, there is a report on the degree to which each candidate’s family is exactly like yours in every way; we knew this would be an important factor in your decision. (By the way, in those cases where we thought it possible that a male candidate might have strayed from the marital bed, we have tried to provide photos of the alleged mistresses to better help you determine if that person would indeed be “doable.”)

4. Ethnic Background, including notes about his or her parent’s occupation.

5. A Beer, for you to imbibe with all of them in the next room immediately following this meeting. We thought it would be important for you to know which one you most enjoyed doing this with, prior to turning over the financial keys to our company.

We did not bother reporting on the height or weight of the candidate, since the thought that we might have put forward a short or fat executive is laughable.

By the way, I should probably note that all of the candidates have a few very, very minor common shortcomings. For example, some of them know literally nothing about our industry and have declared they have little interest in learning. Others have worked in our industry for decades so clearly do know about it, but for some reason are asking us to tell you that they haven’t and don’t. Also, at the risk of being all TMI, maybe I should let you know that they pretty much all have some potential moral issues surrounding both honesty issues and fiduciary responsibility. All of them have been caught in huge whoppers in their job interviews, trying to provide us with answers they thought we wanted to hear. Also, most of them have a history of accepting money and other “gifts” from vendors for their personal use, and then giving those vendors massive, overpriced and often-unnecessary contracts that have helped sink their previous employers’ financial position. (We debated even telling you any of these last items; what with the criteria listed above and knowing that they weren’t fatties or under 6 foot it hardly seemed relevant.)

So please, we ask that you take your time and talk to each candidate in small 30-second increments about any of the criteria we laid out above before giving us your hiring recommendation. After all, your future earnings depend on you making the right choice.