 is human creativity, AT&T simply must attract and keep the best talent available, without regard to race, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant circumstance. If you base decisions on a deep understanding of your company's self-interest and values, you will pick your battles carefully and avoid getting drawn into fights that you don't intend to win. By walking down the middle of the road during the Planned Parenthood contro- versy-neither appearing to cave in to the Religious Right nor siding with the proponents of abortion-we left AT&T vulnerable on both sides. The Focus Incident Furthermore, the exercise of corporate social responsibility should not be based on making regular deposits in a mythical "trust bank"-for example, by sentencing its CEO to chair charity dinners-against the inevitable day when it will need to make a withdrawal. AT&T learned the futility of this quid pro quo approach in a firestorm of criticism it suffered in 1993 over a small cartoon in an employee publication called Focus. When an article intended for AT&T's all-employee magazine, Focus, was killed just before press time, the editors substituted an in- nocuous quiz on AT&T's international operations, and an outside de- sign studio inserted cartoons into a hastily prepared layout. The AT&T Tough Calls production manager back in New Jersey (who happened to be a young black woman) received a blurry fax of the art and signed off on the piece. What she didn't know was that a small drawing intended to depict telephone calling around the world showed stereotypical fig- ures, including a man in a beret in Europe-and a monkey on the phone in Africa. As soon as the first copies arrived in our offices, the editor knew we had a problem. Ashen-faced, she brought the cartoon to her boss's attention. The full run of 250,000 copies was already on its way to people's homes, SO we did what the textbooks say you're supposed to do: Admit the mistake before someone else makes a big deal of it, accept respon- sibility, an