Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick.

For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY’s CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.

This, it turns out, is more than a curiosity. Psychiatry professor Rense Lange, an expert on tests for everyone from students to job hunters to those with early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, has been looking hard at color tests and he has reached the conclusion that the results all but prove that CEOs are wired differently.

They are often wired in counterintuitive ways. For example, the color test shows that the typical CEO is more sensitive and private than the typical person and is less likely to be a perfectionist or to be dominant and more likely to be emotionally unstable. CEOs, it turns out, are not as self-assured as the public at large, and they are more cooperative and less forceful than the typical person, says Dewey Sadka, who has spent the last 15 years refining the color test completed by the 877 current and retired CEOs and chairmen.

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Glassdoor.com, a website that lets employees anonymously rate and review their employers, has released its list of the nicest and naughtiest CEOs of 2008. The nicest CEO is Genentech’s Art Levinson with a 92% approval rating and the least popular CEO is Steve Odland of Office Depot, with a disapproval rating of 80% (why that’s even worse than President Bush’s!)

What’s up with Office Depot? One department manager in Dallas Texas wrote:

“Fire Odland and kill ridiculous programs like ones listed above. Please, Please, Please give this company back to its workers. The corporate office in Delray Beach, FL is asleep at the wheel and frankly incompetent. Maybe If some of them would listen to or maybe even spend a few hours in a store they would understand their own business a little better. This company will fail If you do not get back to basics! Cheap no hassle prices and fast checkout! NO MORE PROGRAMS PLEASE!”

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In the city where I live there are Staples, Office Max and Office Depot within 10 minutes drive of each other. Guess which one they recently closed down!