ance that they wouldn't be able to reach agreement. When the deal later fell through, not only did we have egg on our face, but the Journal reporters, among others who had hyped the story to their own editors, felt burned. So when things began to go amiss for the company, we had a more difficult time controlling the damage than we would have had if we had been more modest in laying out our plans. In itself, even the ninety-day deadline proved foolhardy. As soon as we said we "expected to reach agreement in ninety days," all the re- porters and editors covering AT&T put a note in their calendars three months out. Second to writing about personalities, following up on anniversaries, deadlines, and self-imposed goals is the easiest way for the media to write about you. Set as few goals as possible, avoid im- posing deadlines on yourself, and remember all your anniversaries. Tough Calls MediaOne On March 22, 1999, when I heard that Comcast had reached an agree- ment to buy the third-largest cable operator, MediaOne, for $60 bil- lion in stock, I went straight to Armstrong's office to make sure he knew. He was already scribbling his thoughts on the lined pad he carried with him from meeting to meeting. "The most important thing," he said, "is that it confirms our strategy. And it recognizes the value of the TCI acquisition." (AT&T had paid about $3,000 per TCI subscriber, whereas analysts were valuing Comcast's bid at $4,000 to $5,000 per MediaOne subscriber.) I knew that Armstrong, Hindery, and Somers had planned on tak- ing a run at MediaOne after the dust settled on the TCI deal, which had closed just two weeks earlier. In fact, the project had been given a code name, Project Denver, months before, and they had already approached Boston investor Amos Hostetter about joining AT&T in its bid. Hostetter, who had cofounded Continental Cablevision and sold it to US West, which renamed it MediaOne, had had a falling out with the company's CEO, Chuck Lillis. Hostetter was still mulling over AT&T's offer when Comcast annou