Armstrong was fond of saying that "AT&T has the broadest capabil- ities of any communications company in the world but what sets us apart is the way [we] put them together." To date, however, it was the cable business that stood apart. Cable could have been a distribution channel and network services provider to the company's consumer Casting Is Everything and business divisions. Instead, under Hindery, it became a stand- alone business, creating its own portfolio of service bundles. Even if he didn't want to change the business model completely, Armstrong could have signaled that he expected the cable business to partner with the other AT&T units to a greater extent. In fact, the first draft of the news release and his letter to the employees of AT&T Broadband included such an expectation. "Our job now," I had him saying, "is to focus more on building teamwork across the entire AT&T enterprise." While this was subtle, Somers and the other AT&T business leaders would have caught its significance. Armstrong scratched it out. When executives leave a company, especially if they have been eased out, the company's lawyers will caution against saying or doing anything that might trigger a lawsuit. CEOs themselves often have mixed feelings about high-level firings, realizing that in many cases they share some of the blame for an executive's failure. Armstrong reduced the executive ranks at AT&T by 30 percent, but in almost all cases the officers affected were allowed to pick the circumstances under which they left, often after landing a job somewhere else. While this softened the blow for many of the affected executives, it created the impression of "brain drain" as some of the most familiar names within the company's ranks left for other jobs. At one point, Arm- strong was even blamed for departures, such as Joe Nacchio's, that had occurred before he had arrived on the scene. Eventually, we let it be known that many of the departures were planned, but by then the pattern had been set. Of all the top-level executives wh