 you're telling them everything when you tell them anything." Armstrong and Noski were primed to tell them almost everything we knew, but there were still many open issues. In fact, the biggest uncertainty was whether the banks would provide the additional $25 billion facility we needed as a safety net if our credit rating were down- graded while we had $32 billion of short-term debt coming due. But Armstrong had other things on his mind. When he got to the podium, as a preamble to his formal remarks, he told the assembled analysts that he was "personally offended" by accusations that he had changed his strategy. Then he went into the same pitch he had given me earlier in the month. This was a huge mistake, even though he appeared to sincerely believe it, because he made "changing the strategy" the story instead of what we were announcing. It also damaged his credibility. It would have been far better to say, "We had the right strategy, we made prog- ress against it, but we ran out of time," which would have had the advantage of being not only true, but credible. For months Armstrong persisted in denying that he had changed his strategy, despite my warnings that he was losing what little credi- bility he had left. He finally stopped arguing the point, but still had some of the attitude of Galileo, who, after being forced to recant his teachings that the earth revolves around the sun, said quietly under his breath, "but still it moves." The difference, of course, is that Gali- leo was right. It wasn't until he read a draft of this book that Armstrong conceded he had "misjudged that keeping the company together was the only strategy people cared about."6 But then in a May 2004 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he remembered that in the fall of 2000, "I lay It's Okay to Change Your Mind 223 there night after night what should I do, change the strategy or change the company?" This isn't sheer obstinacy. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his study of decision making, says most people are no