. Finally, he was highly critical, always looking for a better way to do things. Bono eventually moved to AT&T's payroll, taking a relatively unde- fined job in Human Resources. His official portfolio was broadly de- fined as "culture change," but he spent most of his time interpreting Walter to us and us to Walter. (He left when Walter did and eventually became senior vice president of corporate communications for the ServiceMaster Company.) CEO Management Companies don't make decisions, people do. It's folly to assume that all CEOs are alike or that you can learn anything truly meaningful about CEOs by reading their biographies. The two AT&T CEOs and three presidents that I knew most intimately-Bob Allen, Mike Arm- strong, Alex Mandl, John Walter, and John Zeglis-could not have been more different, although, interestingly, four of the five were Mid- westerners. (Armstrong and Walter had even graduated from the same Tough Calls college, Miami of Ohio.) Each had his own style. Some were morning people; others were night owls. Some were cerebral; others were more intuitive. Two were salesmen; one was a lawyer; one started in finance; one in the telephone business, supervisor of operators old enough to be his mother. None were engineers, even though they spent the peak of their careers in the most technical of industries in the period of greatest technological change. In psychoanalytic terms, Walter and Armstrong showed many of the characteristics of productive narcissists; Allen, Zeglis, and Mandl showed the characteristics of productive obsessives in their conscien- tious focus on operations and on bringing order to a chaotic environ- ment. All five men were smart, despite what has been written about some of them. None was particularly greedy, at least by today's stan- dards, and I personally never had reason to question the integrity of any of them. The two who became CEO of AT&T were done in by bad casting decisions. Board Duties It's said that the most important responsibility of a board of directors is to sel