From experience: The only thing I agree with on the "do not use the basic colors", is that some C-level stakeholder 5 forwarded emails down the road (and never present on the status calls), will not bother to read the damn thing fully, and will see the RED on statistic-X and will think that the X-thing is doomed and we need to slash this project/product/function. Yes, I agree, it's not a color thing, it's a RTFpresentation-thing. But the use of non-standard colors (red-amber/yellow-green) will avoid these mishaps.