ing rates and allowing service quality to slip. When the Bell patents expired in 1894, its disaffected customers couldn't wait to give their business to competitors. By 1907, Bell was in sorry financial condition. Financier J. P. Morgan agreed to bail the company out only if it would agree to bring Vail back as president. Vail was sixty-two years old, his wife and only son had recently died, and he had made a fortune in South American transit development. No one would have blamed him if he had wanted to stay on his farm in Lyn- donville, Vermont. But he got back in the saddle and served as presi- dent of AT&T until June of 1919, when he retired at the age of seventy- four. He died less than a year later. The company's earnings per share trended steadily downward dur- ing Vail's years and didn't recover until he had been dead for six years. The company's share price declined from about $123 a share in May of 1907, when he took over for the second time, to $106 a share when he left in 1919. But few would argue that he didn't serve the company and its stakeholders well. As John Brooks put it in his history of the Bell System, Telephone, Vail's failure to increase earnings or the stock price was really his tri- umph, "the measure of his stature as a builder rather than a money- maker."4 Under Vail, the number of phones in service more than doubled, from fewer than 6 million to more than I2 million; nation- wide service was inaugurated; local service was improved; and the pre- decessor to Bell Laboratories was formed. The business system he built survived for another sixty-five years, paying dividends through world wars and depression until it had be- come the most valuable company in the world by the time of its cen- tennial in 1976. The principles on which Vail conducted business-high quality, friendly service, and managing for the long pull-had survived in AT&T's DNA. As a monopoly trying to justify its profits, the Bell System's motto was: "We earn to serve." But when its monopoly was broken-in fact, if not yet by