lations officer at a major corporation is very lonely. Your colleagues in the executive suite either don't know what you're getting SO worked up about or can't understand why you can't fix whatever is wrong. They measure the depth of public rela- tions problems in column-inches of the newspapers they read, espe- cially the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today, and they're incredulous that you can't schmooze those newspapers' reporters into line. When things get really bad, solicitous colleagues at other companies ask, "How are you holding up?" in a tone that sug- gests that they hope they never catch what you've got. Outside Advice When things are just about at their worst, your phone rings off the hook with experts of all stripes offering to solve the problem for you. One high-profile PR counselor offered to host dinners for Bob Allen with the "people who run the New York media." Doubting that that Tough Calls would accomplish much even if he could pull it off, we passed. An- other advised, in all earnestness, that what we needed was "to put a stop to all these negative stories." Hello? One outfit came in through our Washington, D.C., lobbying office and, after subtly criticizing what we had done to date (which admit- tedly wasn't working very well), proposed doing a "gap analysis" be- tween current public perceptions and what we would like those perceptions to be. This group's method for articulating the gap was fascinating-it hired the U.S. editor of the Sunday Times of London to write two Fortune-like profiles of AT&T, based on everything that had already been published about us since the downsizing announcement. The Sunday Times editor produced two pieces-titled "AT&T: Poised to Compete" and "AT&T: A Company at Sea"-that were re- markable examples of using the same material to make diametrically opposed cases. In one, Bob Allen was "a corporate hate figure not seen in America since the robber barons stalked across the nation, despoiling the country and abusing the workers." In the other, he