terating our key messages: Walter's experience and leadership qualities would supple- ment our senior team; he had already proven himself by transforming traditional business into a thriving, global high-tech company; Wal- ter and Allen will partner closely, and SO on. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Allen getting restless. He could feel a full-fledged rehearsal coming on, and he hated to be "handled." He wanted no part of it, preferring to read his remarks and Tough Calls the Q&A we had prepared in the quiet of his office. Walter apparently was used to having his staff stage-manage every appearance. We would later learn that he had a very short attention span; he seldom read anything that was longer than a page, and he preferred to work from highly graphic "mind maps" that outlined the major ideas of his speeches, with lines and arrows connecting boxes of memory- jogging bulleted items like "snake story, off-line, acronyms, Carpet- land." (The snake story was Ross Perot's oft-repeated remark that if a snake showed up in General Motors's boardroom, the board would form a committee to study it rather than simply kill it. "Off-line" re- ferred to a frequent habit within AT&T of taking contentious issues "off-line," or dealing with them outside a meeting rather than con- fronting them when they came up. Acronyms referred to telecommu- nications people's love of reducing everything to initials, then turning them into words and using them as if everyone knew what they stood for. "Carpetland" referred to the executive floors at Basking Ridge, where the offices were arrayed around the perimeter of the building SO that each could have a terrace, leaving a broad expanse of thickly carpeted, empty floor in the middle. Most of Walter's speeches criti- cized what he considered AT&T's hidebound culture.) The Media Reacts Even mind maps, however, could not have prepared Walter for the news conference that followed. The media arrived with chips on their shoulders. Allen was reminded that he had said he would step aside