nsible for SO much downsizing, it didn't matter how much emotion Allen invested in his defense. It would even have been futile for Allen to "go on television and cry," as he derisively told Newsweek his critics wanted. His tears would have been met only with cynicism. Political and social symbols do more than signify something; they actually evoke the strong feelings involved in their creation. Allen was a symbol, not simply in the sense that he stood for "downsizing" or "corporate greed," the way a barber pole signals haircuts, but in the sense that he actually evoked all the feelings of pent-up fear and anger that working people were experiencing. And no rational argument could change that. Again, once formed, symbols persist until they are replaced by other, more powerful symbols. 28 The window of opportu- nity to create positive symbolism around AT&T's downsizing had closed in the days following the Trivestiture announcement. Ironically, we eventually did some of the right things, but by the time we did them, it was too late. For example, we ran ads to help displaced workers find jobs. Had the ads appeared in the first days following our downsizing announcement, they would have demon- strated some degree of social responsibility. Ninety days later, they appeared to be a reaction to the public backlash rather than a sincere Tough Calls effort to help our employees. And we never took what would have been the most significant step we could have taken: freezing execu- tives' salaries and deferring their stock option grants. That not only would have denied our critics a potent argument, but would have sym- bolized a spirit of shared sacrifice. At bottom, a fixation on the company's stock price blinded AT&T's top management to larger issues. It caused us to rush the process of breaking up the company, which led to a series of missteps. If we had kept to our original schedule, we would not have announced a writedown at the beginning of 1996, in the midst of the presidential primaries. And there would have been a goo