 hindsight, it is easy to see the sequence of events that would make Mandl's resignation more than the typical executive pas- sage. Coming just as criticism of AT&T's layoffs and its CEO's com- pensation was beginning to die down, it stimulated new questions about CEO succession. We should have seen then that it would inevi- tably subject the company's board to increased scrutiny, particularly if the search for Mandl's successor faltered. Few, if any, boards are comfortable when the media's lens focuses on them. Inevitably, they do whatever is necessary to shift the focus of attention back to manage- ment, even if it means installing a new set of managers. Of course, it's easy to predict this outcome years after the fact, but Burson-Marsteller's Tom Bell had, in fact, forecast this possibility as far back as the previ- ous February, when we were trying to work our way through the media storm surrounding our layoff announcement. AT&T has always had a blue-chip board, and its members at that time included Fortune 50 CEOs, the president emeritus of an Ivy League university, a renowned economist, and a former ambassador to the U.N. To a person, they were stalwartly loyal to Bob Allen, whom they considered a thoughtful, principled, and strong leader. They were naturally concerned about the negative publicity that the company had received over the past few months, but it was not an unfamiliar phe- nomenon to any of them. They considered it all a failure of perception (and therefore a PR problem) rather than a failure of strategy or execu- tion, and certainly not a failure of integrity. Besides, throughout the media firestorm, no one had seriously questioned the board's role or Take Control suggested that it was accountable for any of the company's perceived failings. We should have seen that Mandl's resignation was the lead- ing edge of a wave that would change all that. In fact, in drafting the release about Mandl's resignation, I had hypothesized a board-level search committee to select Mandl's succes- sor as preside