ught we could make it work. We didn't execute."29 His natural reserve made him appear aloof and even cold to people he met individually or in small groups, especially compared to his predecessor as AT&T chairman and CEO, Jim Olson. Olson was garru- lous, outgoing, impatient, and always on the move. When one of his Tough Calls meetings ended early, Olson famously asked his lieutenants who among them had conflicts SO that he could resolve them in the time left. Allen could spend long hours in his office, rolling a cigar around in his mouth, just thinking. But those of us who saw Allen in those days did not question for an instant that he was in pain. He was hurt, embarrassed, and deeply sad-not only for his own reputation, which clearly weighed on him, but for all the people whose lives he had dis- rupted. He once even worried out loud what his mother, who died of leukemia when he was twenty-seven years old, would have thought of him. But there didn't appear to be a thing he could do about it-and, at least initially, the unofficial CEO club told him to accept that it was AT&T's turn in the barrel; he should tough it out and wait for the furor to subside. That's not how Marilyn Laurie saw it. Olson had made her the highest-ranking woman in the company at least partly because she shared his impatience and activism. Her route to the top of what was then probably the largest corporate public relations organization in the world was as unconventional as she was. Marilyn Laurie In 1969, Marilyn Laurie was a stay-at-home mom, caring for two young daughters while her husband earned a living as a commercial artist. One Saturday, paging through the Village Voice classifieds for an ad her husband had placed for help in his art studio, she saw a tiny notice that a group was coming together to plan New York City's participation in the first Earth Day celebrations. The first meeting was scheduled to take place that afternoon at Barnard College, from which she had graduated ten years before. She hadn't been back since, and the coi