There's a limit to how creative leadership can be.

• Position: Bill Simms, former president of Transamerica Reinsurance Co.

Bill Simms didn't want to talk about it. "I really had to push him to get him to say anything about this period of his life," David Mildenberg recalls.

Mildenberg, editor of Triangle Business Journal, was BNC's managing editor when we ran his cover story on Simms, then president of Transamerica Reinsurance Co. and the only black on the Carolina Panthers ownership. team, in 1994.

Mildenberg had wanted to talk to some teachers at the University of Southern California, where Simms said he got his undergraduate and M.B.A. degrees. Simms gave him one name - Warren Bennis, a professor emeritus of management whose research on leadership development is a staple of many M.B.A. programs. Wanting to know if Bennis had seen anything that foreshadowed Simms' ascension to the corporate heights, Mildenberg left four phone messages. Bennis never called back.

Turns out Simms never attended Southern Cal - he doesn't have a college degree. Living this lie for more than two decades cost him his livelihood. But it was fraudulent feats on the cinders that tripped him up. Not long after he came to Charlotte in 1992, someone introduced him as an Olympic gold medalist.

Rather than correct the error, he added it to his...