 in I99I as chief financial officer and in short order cut $1 billion from the company's cost structure-not a particu- larly surprising move for a new CFO. Nor did it turn many heads when he revived negotiations with McCaw Cellular by devising a $400 million minority investment that demonstrated the seriousness of AT&T's intentions, while simultaneously getting McCaw through a cash crunch that was diverting its attention from the negotiations. Scrapping earlier plans to buy only a piece of the wireless company in favor of a full merger was audacious, but not unexpected from a top- flight CFO. But insiders knew that he was destined to be more than the chief financial officer when he began to preach the gospel of "pro- miscuous, fat minutes and bits." By then, AT&T had spent millions investing in a mixed bag of pro- prietary technologies ranging from yet another generation of video- phones to handheld tablets that were supposed to turn handwriting into computer text. Reasoning that AT&T would never be able to out- design Apple or outprogram Microsoft, Mandl declared, "It's the net- work, stupid!" in SO many words. He pushed for multiple nonexclusive relationships with companies that could put digital bits on the AT&T network. Let MCI and Sprint fight over the calls to Tough Calls Grandma; he would replace them with new multimedia services, and he would tap all those kids working out of their parents' garage in Silicon Valley to help develop them. In mid-1994, only about three years after arriving as CFO, Mandl was named head of the company's largest division, communication services, and in January of 1996, he was named president. But Allen remained coy about naming Mandl his likely successor, even when all the other obvious candidates had left, and when he named Mandl president, he also created a "Chairman's Office" that included the new CFO, Rick Miller, and the chief counsel, John Zeglis. Publicly, Allen always said that he thought Mandl had a shot at someday succeeding him. Privately, he told board members that 