The dualistic view of fission and evaporation as two distinct compound nucleus processes is substituted with a unified view in which fission, complex fragment emission and light particle evaporation are seen as part of a single process. The underlying connection between these decay modes is the mass asymmetry coordinate and the ridge line as the locus of the associated conditional barriers. The theoretical generalization is carried out explicitly. Complex fragment production at all mass asymmetries, throughout the periodic table, from low to intermediate bombarding energies is discussed in the light of compound nucleus decay.