osite of the AT&T culture. When AT&T was a monopoly no one was rewarded for taking risks. On the contrary, people were rewarded for identifying risks and avoiding them. People based their careers on analyzing and planning, not on executing, which was simply assumed to be the product of momentum. There was no particular urgency to making decisions; opportunities would wait until the analysis was completed and published in a thick binder. In general, the company adhered to the cesspool theory of decision-making, refusing to deal with an issue until it floated to the surface. When problems arose-as they occasionally did even in a monopoly-resources would be thrown at them until they went away. A monopoly has plenty of resources. Also, a company without competitors naturally turns inward. AT&T developed complex standards to tell it what was going on in the out- side world of its customers in the form of blocked calls, held orders, and the seconds it took an operator to answer a call. AT&T executives pored over these performance indices, looking for areas that fell sig- nificantly below or above average. The internal competition that this process fostered provided the best telephone service in the world, but it was slow and inflexible. And the spirit of internal competition hung on in the management psyche like a virus, long after it had outlived its usefulness, making cross-unit collaboration difficult and tedious. A Future Armstrong knew that he had less than five years to deliver on the singular request the board had made of him. At his very first board meeting, he had asked the directors what they expected of him. Ralph Larsen, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, put it simply. "A future," he said. "We expect you to give AT&T a future." In pursuit of that goal, Armstrong was willing to take risks and make decisions before all the data were in. He believed that "compa- Tough Calls nies suffered more damage from consistently delayed decisions than from occasionally wrong" ones.3 Rather than waiting for all the data, he wa