ing. The selling then fed on itself, and it was days before the stock recovered. By then, the media had set the storyline explaining the first day's decline in the stock: Mandl was the apparent successor to Allen, he had been frustrated at playing second fiddle to a CEO who showed no inclination to leave the stage, and the company was unlikely to find a capable player who was also willing to sit quietly in the wings. Sadly, Tough Calls Bob Allen once again became the story. Fortune magazine perhaps characterized it best as more "salt in [Allen's] wounds."2 Keep Control of the Story It's always nice to have the last word in a debate, but in the real world, where first impressions are often the basis for hair-trigger decisions that tend to reinforce themselves through repetition, getting the first word is critical. We lost control of the announcement of Mandl's resig- nation at the precise moment that someone leaked it to Jack Grub- man. At that point, we were not just dealing with Mandl and Allen's competing interests, we were pawns in Grubman's drama. Jack Grubman had once held a relatively low-level management position within AT&T's Finance Department. He probably had not even met the company's CFO, much less its chairman, in all the time he was with the company. But over the years, he had leveraged his status as a "former AT&T executive" to position himself as an expert on the company and the telecommunications industry. His gift for trenchant comments led him to be quoted on a semiregular basis in the Wall Street Journal and, eventually, elsewhere. As he became better known, he forged relationships with key executives within the com- pany, many of whom spoke candidly about the company's problems and challenges. This access made Grubman a regular source for the preeminent AT&T-watcher, the Journal's John Keller. For much of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Grubman was positive, if not overly enthusiastic, about AT&T. But then his allegiance changed, and by the time Mandl resigned, Grubman was touting the sto