 a way, they had an embedded self-interest in keeping prior strategies alive, even at the expense of new ones. So they were much more likely to embrace partial fixes, such as bundling multiple existing services on a single bill-rather than efforts to rede- sign the business from scratch. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that there was a mono- lithic "AT&T culture" and to lay all the blame for the company's prob- lems there. Culture makes a difference, but it has been oversold as an excuse for corporate failure. AT&T had many traits common to large companies. It was slow-moving, internally focused, and religiously hi- erarchical. Given its long history, AT&T also had some unique charac- teristics. Its monopoly days left employees with deep feelings of entitlement as well as higher ideals-such as a spirit of service and a sense of family. But within this general social envelope were strains of sharply different cultures that defined how people perceived the world and how they behaved. AT&T Labs, for example, still had much more in common with Bell Labs, from which it had been carved in the 1996 Trivestiture, than with the rest of AT&T. Its 6,000 employees lived in a semi-academic environment, largely disconnected from the fortunes of the busi- nesses they ostensibly served. Similarly, the corporate staffs-law, government affairs, human re- sources, finance, and public relations-were huge bureaucracies in their own right moving in and out of the businesses' gravitational pull. For example, the law department, which Zeglis had once led, thought of itself as the company's true intellectual leadership. It tried to have the final word on nearly every business decision, shaped strategy by interpreting laws and regulations and the extent to which they could be stretched, and had successfully resisted attempts to put it under the control of anyone but the CEO. The people in Network Operations, which ran the vast AT&T net- work, had an engineering mentality. Highly regimented, they were process-oriented and did eve