nt. That was quickly struck from the release, and I was reminded that we were searching for a chief operating officer, not a When Allen installed the leadership team at Lucent Technologies prior to its spin-off from AT&T, he felt that he had broken the code on planning for CEO succession. The Lucent team consisted of an experienced CEO, the former chairman of Cummins Engine, Henry Schacht, acting as mentor to a younger but promising president, Rich McGuinn. Since he was only sixty-one, Allen believed that the same model was appropriate for AT&T, which, while not a new company, was navigating uncharted technological and regulatory waters. What he didn't appreciate was that McGuinn, who had spent most of his career at AT&T, was more amenable to a period of apprenticeship than most qualified outside executives would be. Anyone who would be ready to take the helm at AT&T in three or four years was unlikely to believe that he or she needed to wait three or four years to do it. In retrospect, we should have anticipated this and embraced it. For example, we could have used Mandl's resignation as an opportunity to describe the kind of leadership that would be required for the next phase of AT&T's transformation. Allen could have announced a defin- itive plan to adopt the Schacht/McGuinn model that he had devised for Lucent in preparing to step aside as CEO of AT&T. And we could have made the search much more of a board responsibility rather than something the board was briefed on but didn't really control. Had we taken this approach, we might have avoided the painful disruptions that lay ahead of us. As we shall see, we ended up in the same place, but at a much higher cost to both the company and its CEO. This page intentionally left blank Complete the CEO CEOs, like the rich, are different from you and me principally because they think they are. What makes them dangerous is the ways in which they're the same. For example, they suffer from the same selective hearing and wishful thinking as you and me. They have the same 