a mission that was worthy of our past and capable of driving our fu- ture. In fact, in many ways, we suggested that AT&T's past had come to a dead end in an "unsustainable business." The company's con- sumer business, for example, was left in that cul de sac while we used its earnings to blaze new paths elsewhere. Ironically, it was the challenge of renewing a company of historical significance that drew Armstrong away from his new home in Califor- nia. And many of the actions he took could have animated a new sense of corporate purpose. But that purpose was lost in a flurry of deal making. And without the framework of such a mission, the deals hung on a scaffolding of financial engineering that ultimately fell in the gales of capricious markets. The Power of Promise A "promise" is either something you make to others or what others make of you. Anyone can make loud promises, and, if these promises are grand enough, they will stir people's imaginations. Over time, they become inflated, and when they bump up against reality, they have a tendency to burst. Overpromising is a slippery slope, but it's one that can easily be avoided. The promise that others have invested in you, however, is equally volatile. On the one hand, it provides the energy you need to conquer the challenges ahead, but unless it is tempered, it can be explosive. If I could do one thing over again, I would counsel resetting and lowering the expectations that piled up around Armstrong like a high wall from the very beginning. He was right in anticipating that the media and analysts would allow him only ninety days of silence. But the roots of the company's problems extended back fifteen years, to 1982, when the company agreed to break up the Bell System. Ironically, at that time, both AT&T and IBM had correctly foreseen that digital technologies would erase the boundary between the com- munications and computing industries, and both companies had made acquisitions based on that conviction. AT&T famously tried to use the Unix operating system softw