t aware of changing their minds even when they do. "Most peo- ple, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion," he says. "They believe they always thought that."8 Tragically, that leaves them vulnerable to making the same mistakes and makes it impossi- ble for others to learn from them. There is another lesson to be learned here as well. The first leaks were stories in themselves. Bloomberg News, for example, reported, "AT&T will break up once again, according to a story in this morning's Wall Street Journal." (I once had the experience of asking Bloomberg to correct a story it had issued based on an earlier Wall Street Journal story that was SO clearly in error that the Journal editors had already agreed to run a correction the next day. Bloomberg refused to correct its story, declaring it was reporting what the Journal had written, not the underlying facts the Journal had written about. It did, however, offer to report the Journal's correction when it ran.) When we finally made the official announcement, most of the media picked up on the tenor, and in many cases the thesis, of what had already been written. The New York Times declared, the "company revises 3-year effort to consolidate all services." Even Newsweek's Allan Sloan, who may have been one of Armstrong's last fans among finan- cial writers, chided him for "changing directions to cater to Wall Street's whimsical tastes." Ken McGee, of the Gartner Group, set him- self up just outside our news conference to do a series of tag-team interviews bemoaning "the sad day in corporate history" and the "sur- render to Wall Street."9 I don't mean to suggest that all reporters and editors treat what is written in one another's papers as gospel. They don't. But they do use it as a jumping-off point. When the Journal reported the restructuring as a reversal of strategy-and Armstrong took the bait-this became the angle from which nearly every other paper played it. For the most part, we failed to give them something else to write about. As CEO, Arm