ile, Dan Som- ers, the company's CFO, who had run a small cable company in the United Kingdom, would be temporarily in charge. Somers wasted no time asserting himself in the cable business. He rented a furnished house near its Denver headquarters and by the end of November had already spent more time there than Hindery had all year. Within weeks, he had brought in his own chief financial officer, replaced other senior executives, and began complaining to Arm- strong that Hostetter's presence was "confusing" people inside and outside the company. But no one was confused about Somers's inten- tion of keeping the cable job. On the one hand, Somers's aggressive posture helped reassure the employees of AT&T Broadband. He held a series of employee town meetings around the country, and by simply showing up at the Denver headquarters, rather than managing by FedEx, he communicated a sense of leadership continuity. But he was no improvement when it came to working with the other AT&T units. For example, he resisted efforts to lease his unit's cables to AT&T's business services division, while laying his own plans to offer communication services to small businesses. Armstrong, who had bet his reputation on the success of the cable business, was SO obsessed with the pace of system upgrades and telephony penetration that he chalked up any complaints to tradi- tional AT&T intramural skirmishes over turf. Focusing on the internal fallout over Hindery's leaving was exactly the right thing to do. However, we failed to do it right. How Hindery's leaving would affect the people within his own unit was a no-brainer and received a lot of attention. What was less obvious-and just as critical-was how it would affect the broader universe of AT&T em- ployees. Here was an opportunity to signal that Hindery's failing had not been his thumbing his nose at the schedule of authorizations or forcing an embarrassing retraction about third-party discussions, but his inability to collaborate with the other AT&T businesses in any meaningful way. 