Would Hershey Foods Corporation's story of undelivered candy that piled up in the company's warehouses in 1999 and of the more than US $100 million in lost Halloween sales that year have been any different had close executive board-level oversight of the infamous enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiative taken place? Would Encyclopedia Britannica's perilous encounter with Microsoft's Encarta -- a CD-ROM product that almost single-handedly wiped out most hardcover encyclopedia sales -- have had a different ending in 1996 if the company's executive board fully understood the then-nascent threats to existing business models and embraced electronic content as a new opportunity?