Charles G. Beaudette was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from MIT in 1952 and then served two years in the USAF. Afterwards he did graduate studies at MIT, and practiced engineering with companies thereabout. In 1958 he founded Dychro Corporation, and after a few years of growth sold it to a computer development company. He worked for EG&G Corp. as a senior engineer and engineering manager from 1962 to 1972, where he participated in development of one of the first digital facsimile machines with its associated telephone-line 6400 bps modem. His specialities were system design, image scanning and compression, and digital encoding for transmission.In 1973 he moved to Maine where he offered consulting services to local, national, and international firms for twelve years, retiring in 1985. From 1989 he followed the Cold-Fusion episode which emerged that year from the University of Utah. From 1995 to 2002 he wrote two editions of Excess Heat, Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, a report on the revolutionary experimental science at the core of the subject, and the extensive theoretical controversy surrounding it. His papers from that undertaking now reside as a special collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. He has watched committees, boards, and their members, trustees, directors for fifty years. He offers here a distillation of the dark side of leadership. Mr. Beaudette has three children and lives with his wife in the village of South Bristol, Maine.