pointment of Charles Noski as AT&T's chief financial officer. Noski, who had worked with Armstrong at Hughes Electronics as controller and then CFO, became that company's president and chief operating officer after Armstrong left for AT&T. Armstrong had gone after him as soon as the two-year freeze on recruiting his former Stay Off the Treadmill of Expectations Hughes colleagues had expired. Noski had not yet talked to his chil- dren about the prospect of moving east, and, understandably, that was not something he planned to rush-even for an AT&T news release. At II P.M., Armstrong told me that it still hadn't happened, SO I tore up that version of the release. Noski's appointment was announced just days later, and he started work almost immediately, commuting weekly from his home in Cali- fornia SO that his daughters could finish the school year there. He didn't realize it then, but this was a schedule that he would keep for three years as the company went through a period of financial uncer- tainty, romanced a series of merger partners, and ultimately split into smaller parts. There are some people (inside and outside AT&T) who believe that the company would have had a very different future had he become CFO just one year earlier. As it was, he spent his first few months trying to figure out what he had gotten himself into. The year 2000 had begun with conflicting signals. The wireless business, which would soon be floating an initial public offering for shares tracking its performance, was doing even better than antici- pated. The long-distance businesses, on the other hand, were strug- gling to meet financial benchmarks based on MCI WorldCom's results, which would later prove to have been grossly exaggerated. By the time Noski arrived on the scene, the long-distance unit heads were trying to renegotiate their financial targets for the year. That in itself was not unusual. Every business unit began the year with a gap be- tween its annual targets and its latest revenue and earnings outlook. Over the course of 