d to trumpet financial results that they were manufactur- ing in their accounting departments. With all that, he delivered the earnings he projected in eighteen of the twenty quarters he led the company, even in the midst of an industry meltdown in 2001 and 2002. Tough Calls Of course, every CEO makes tough calls. As we shall see, Allen's and Armstrong's were made more difficult because the two men were sometimes caught in a web of outsized expectations, internal political games, and industry fraud. And the fog of war is not limited to the battlefield. Most major business decisions are made in a similar cruci- ble of fast-changing, fragmentary, and conflicting data. Business deci- sion makers are often just as torn between the success of their mission and the welfare of their troops. They suffer the same self- doubt, wishful thinking, and fear of failure. Their lieutenants are sometimes competent, sometimes conniving, and never completely transparent. If lives are seldom at stake in their decisions, the quality of lives certainly is, along with the prosperity of countless families and communities. I've tried to capture how messy this period was for AT&T, lest any- one believe that the choices were obvious. But no one can adequately describe the unrelenting pressure to reverse a decline that had been gathering momentum for more than a decade. I haven't told all, not only for reasons of space, but to honor per- sonal confidences, protect the company's proprietary information, and also because some events, while perhaps titillating, were extraneous to my themes. During these years, I never made a secret of my plans to write about my experiences. All the quotes in this book are based on notes that I took at the time or in later interviews. When I quote people's thoughts, it is because at some point they told me what they were thinking. This book is neither a pitch for sympathy nor an attempt at expia- tion. For all my mistakes, I am proud of my tenure at AT&T, and especially of the people with whom I worked. Nor is t