en Tom Wyman, an AT&T director, had been CEO of CBS. Assuming that she must be doing a report on the crisis in American education, Allen gave her a big smile and stopped to shake her hand. Then he saw the camera over her shoulder and the microphone in her hand. "Mr. Allen," Stahl said, "I wonder if you would respond to the charge that you got a big pay package for millions and millions of dollars when you're laying off thousands and thousands of people?" Like a deer in the headlights, Allen mumbled something about it not being the right time or place to get into such a discussion. Stahl whispered, "I know, I know," sympathetically and plowed ahead with her questions in a louder, more insistent voice.31 When Allen finally got away and found a quiet corner, he called in. "I'm dead," he said. He wasn't dead yet. There was still more pain to endure. The AT&T annual meeting would follow within weeks, just in time for the media and pundits of every stripe to take a few more swings at him. This page intentionally left blank Take Control What separates PR counselors from wordsmiths and spin doc- tors is an ability to connect seemingly random signals in order to anticipate and prepare for threats that may still be on the other side of the horizon. Such counselors can often inoculate their clients in advance. But not every threat can be anticipated, and sometimes no vaccine is powerful enough. In those cases, your only defense is to embrace the inevitable by making the best of a bad situation. The most important thing is to take control of the situation SO that you can set the agenda of public discourse rather than be put on the defensive. Annual Slugfest AT&T's 1996 annual meeting was held in the Miami Convention Cen- ter amid the usual executive griping that the SEC-imposed ritual was increasingly anachronistic and irrelevant. Every year, the company would spend several hundred thousand dollars swathing a convention hall in blue drapes and constructing a multilevel platform reminiscent of the reviewing stand outside Leni