As of 2008, 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies provided “executive exams” to their top personnel,18 both as a perk and as a way to avoid having a trusted leader die of a heart attack at his or her desk. But an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Executive Physicals: What’s the ROI [Return on Investment]?” answers its own question with what amounts to a firm “not much”—and for all the reasons I have given here: the frequency of false positives, the dangers of the tests themselves (such as radiation), and the unlikelihood of finding a problem in a still-treatable stage.
