1995, it got to be the fourth-largest interexchange carrier. Its high growth rate helped maintain the stock multiple, which helped it acquire more companies. It succeeded in buying MCI, vaulting itself to number two, but then had nowhere left to go. Even if it had gotten hold of Sprint, which was by that point rather smaller than the combined MCI WorldCom, and even if it had really been mak- ing the kind of profits that it was reporting, Bernie Ebbers' company would have had to shift gears to concentrate on improving operations and margins. And that requires a very different kind of manager, and a different kind of corporate cul- ture. That was not the type of corporate culture that the boom years, with their emphasis on growth rather than profitability, cultivated. AT&T Acted on Faith in WorldCom's Numbers WorldCom turned in impressive, if falsified, results even after long distance prices were falling and their competitors' margins were getting squeezed badly. This was not only a problem for WorldCom's many deceived investors but for its competitors as well, because other companies made their own decisions based on a benchmark of WorldCom's reported profits. AT&T reportedly divested itself of its wireless and cable operations-its two best potential growth areas, in an era of declining long distance revenues-because WorldCom was reporting a better return on its assets. AT&T itself had been undergoing change at a rate that the stodgy old cor- poration was having a hard time dealing with. Its bloated basic structure, its DNA as it were, dated back to its days as a huge monopoly. With the RBOCs divested, the remaining company had to learn to live in a competitive world. That was hard enough, though it was a transition that many companies have had to deal with. But with the Telecom Act, the main customers of its manufac- turing arm were suddenly its competitors. For that and other reasons, it spun off Lucent Technologies, and with it most of Bell Labs. That too was traumatic. CEO Michael Armstrong made a last gasp f