An executive returned from a weekend getaway in the Caribbean with a touch of sunburn, a sore shoulder from too much tennis, and a story. As he tells it, he'd been involved in an extremely tense negotiation for the better part of a year. "The principals knew they needed to do this deal, but they were at each other's throats the entire time," he said. "You know who that left in the middle? Me."

This wasn't the executive's only deal, needless to say. But it was the most aggravating single project he could remember. Meetings he would set after acrimonious phone calls would be broken arbitrarily; the slightest deviation in the language or content of a working memo would set back relations for weeks, while both sides railed at each other -- and at him, too.

At some point late in the negotiations the executive got the flu, which gave him an unsettling pale color and a nagging cough. There came another of the seemingly endless hiatuses (which only served, he told me, as an excuse for the principals to once again yell at each other). When he stepped through the door at home one evening, he ranted for so long to his wife and children that they simply stopped eating and watched him.