l not to fall in love with the melody of your own buzz. Armstrong, who had spent much of his career in sales at IBM, had the salesperson's natural inclination to leave his audiences with something new. He seldom gave an interview or made a speech without first considering how he could use it to make news. For a while, that created a drum- beat of positive press. But hidden in those glowing clippings was an air of expectation-and the expectation, as it turns out, got out of hand. As Armstrong and I learned to our regret, if you dance with the media, you don't get to sit down until they get tired. Lower Expectations In retrospect, we would have been better served by making less news and focusing the media-and every other stakeholder-on the chal- lenges we faced. We should have lowered expectations, saying over and over again that the company's transformation would take more than five years, more than the time on Armstrong's contract. We should have cut the dividend and lowered earnings projections (as we ultimately had to do anyway) and explained that we would plow the money we had thus freed up into the company's transformation. (I say this only with the benefit of hindsight. When the idea was finally proposed in late 2000, I argued against it, fearing that it would be interpreted as a last desperate attempt to right the ship. It was, and it was. I should have known better-reality always wins out.) We should have laid out the milestones by which we expected to be judged (and selected them with an eye toward exceeding them). And we should have repeated this litany over and over, no matter how familiar it seemed. We should have tried a lot harder to be boring. Initially, our stock price would have taken a hit, but it would have happened at a time Don't Dance to the Music of Your Own Buzz when most investors were willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, rather than two and a half years later, when the skeptics appeared to have been prescient. Eventually, we would have found the investors who would be with us for 