dl smiled gamely, shifted in his chair a level below the po- dium, and probably thought to himself that if all went well, he would not be anyone's "flunky" for much longer. Mandl's the Man Alex Mandl was born in postwar Austria and was brought up there until he was a teenager, when his parents divorced and he followed his father to the United States. He attended the Happy Valley School in Ojai, California, where his father was headmaster. Then, when it was time for college, he went to Willamette University, where his father took a job teaching literature. He got his M.B.A. at the Univer- sity of California during the antiwar turmoil of the late 1960s and can Take Control still remember walking through lingering tear gas on his way to classes. He had worked at only two companies before AT&T, spending eleven years at Boise Cascade right after college and then moving to a strategic planning job at CSX Corporation, where he worked on its 1987 acquisition of Sea-Land and eventually ran the subsidiary. It has always been hard to pinpoint the secret of Mandl's success. He speaks with a Schwarzenegger-like accent and is not a particularly charismatic figure, being somewhat on the short side and fighting a slight paunch. He is obviously smart and quick-witted, but, more importantly, he has the gift of focus-not in the sense that his powers of concentration are particularly strong, but that he has an unusual ability to sort through the minutiae flying at him every day and pick out the one or two most important issues that deserve his extended attention. In addition, he has an unerring eye for finding the particular talent necessary to attack his chosen issue, and he follows up on these issues relentlessly. If you were to visit Sea-Land even at this late date, you would probably find an old-timer who could rattle off two or three Mandl initiatives that made a difference, whether it was putting every- one on e-mail or installing computerized tracking systems and charg- ing customers a premium for their use. Mandl joined AT&T