the other; they were negotiating through Burlingame. Nevertheless, Laurie wanted me to take a swing at preparing the communications plan for an announcement, assuming that every- thing could be resolved by the following week. She gave me a slim folder, which she told me contained all the background information she had on Walter. When I got back to my office, I was surprised to discover that the folder contained exactly three documents: Walter's official Donnelly biography, listing an impressive number of board memberships (three corporate and seven nonprofit); a copy of a very favorable January 15, 1996, Business Week article about Walter; and what appeared to be a report by author and educator Warren Bennis on Walter's "leadership style." was sure that the executive recruiting firms had prepared fat dos- siers on Walter, which I could get from Burlingame when he returned to the office. Meanwhile, I went onto the Internet to see what I could find. At Donnelly's Web site, I downloaded the last eleven years of the company's financial results. Now, I am not a numbers person. I gave up balancing my checkbook years ago because I find it too tedious and ultimately frustrating. Presented with columns of numbers, my eyes have difficulty focusing. But even allowing for my innumeracy and the fact that, at about $6.5 billion in revenue, Donnelly was much smaller than AT&T, its financial results looked very familiar-revenue in the latest quarter was down 6 percent; in the first nine months of the year, the company had incurred pretax restructuring charges of $560 million as it closed printing plants and wrote off part of a software venture touted in the Business Week article; and excluding those charges and one-time gains, net income had declined 26 percent. Not trusting myself to interpret these results, I returned to Laurie's office. "Marilyn," I said, "unless I'm missing something, Donnelly's financial results look an awful lot like ours, with declining revenue, lower earnings, and lots of write-offs, layoffs, and bad inv