omer problem, or simply reaching an unusual service milestone. Often, the people wrote back asking for an autographed photo of Armstrong leaning against his Harley. As I accompanied him on some of his field trips, I was often impressed by how many of these notes and photos were pinned to cubicle walls, even in the most stridently anti-management, union strongholds. Other Voices Armstrong was not totally hostage to the ideas that came up in that windowless conference room. One of the first calls he received on the Tough Calls day we announced his appointment as CEO was from Iain Vallance, the urbane chairman of British Telecommunications BT had recently been bested in its efforts to merge with MCI by a small upstart called WorldCom. Vallance knew Armstrong from his days as head of IBM World Trade, based in Paris. "Maybe we can do something together," Vallance said. Would Arm- strong be willing to meet? Within days, Armstrong booked a flight on the Concorde and met with Vallance in the British Airways lounge at Heathrow. Nothing was to come of their on-again, off-again discussions for more than six months. That was not the case with the other field trip Armstrong took. On his way back from one of his trips to the west coast, Armstrong dropped in on John Malone in Denver. Armstrong's path had crossed Malone's in his days at Hughes, but they were not close. For his part, Malone had tried several times to do a deal with AT&T only to be frustrated in the end. Malone has the rugged good looks of someone who has just swung off Old Paint after a day of clearing brush on the lower forty. He has a square jaw and flinty eyes. He is a quiet man, not given to arm waving or table pounding. He commands attention simply through the sheer force of the mathematical certainty with which he expresses himself. He spins complex financial strategies with the ease of a cow- boy telling stories around the campfire. Malone actually began his career at AT&T's Bell Labs, which paid for his Ph.D. in operations research. But he was SO discoura