 the board. As a result, when Olson died on a Monday morn- ing, Allen was elected to succeed him the evening of the next day, just in time to chair the company's annual meeting on Wednesday morn- ing in Denver, Colorado. But Allen had not made any such arrangements. On the contrary, he had resisted naming a president at all until Trivestiture forced him to do something with Mandl, who was running the company's most significant operating division. That reluctance, combined with leaving Mandl out of the planning loop for Trivestiture until the final hours and Mandl's increasingly obvious restlessness, created the impression that Allen was one of the small group of men who consider them- selves "CEOs for life." True or not, the announcement of Mandl's resignation would reinforce that impression. Many executives assume that a news release is the foundation doc- ument for all the stories that are written about a particular announce- ment. They sweat over it, tweaking the language and worrying about the order of paragraphs. Or they sprinkle adjectives and jargon around it in the hope of making the news seem more exciting or current. Magic words like state-of-the-art, seamless, robust, and multitasking are meant to lift the announcement of a new widget to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But except for the wire services, which base Tough Calls their first reports almost entirely on news releases, few journalists use them as more than a starting point. Many don't even read them all the way through. And given a choice between using a quote from a news release or the same quote from an interview, a speech, or a letter, most reporters would choose the latter almost as a matter of pride. So I knew that the Q&A (questions and answers) that we prepared as guidance for all the AT&T media relations people who would be fielding reporters' calls was the most critical element of our communi- cations plan. Next in importance was getting our release out at the same time as Mandl's new employers released their's SO that we w