 the magazine's most popular features, and positive reactions outnum- bered negative by two to one. In fact, 20 percent said that it made them feel more favorable toward Bob Allen. We mailed copies of the Understand the Power of Symbols 41 column to 5,400 business and community leaders. But we were fight- ing an uphill battle. In March, the New York Times ran an unprecedented seven-part series on "The Downsizing of America." Not to be outdone, Business- Week followed with its own cover story on "Economic Anxiety."18 Knowing that the easiest way to lead a parade is to jump in front when it passes, President Clinton announced a presidential summit on "cor- porate citizenship." He invited IOO top business executives (including AT&T's Bob Allen) to the White House and exhorted them to "do well" by their employees while "making money for their sharehold- ers." Then he told USA Today that the CEOs made too much money. I9 It was going to be a long road back. Backlash Consumer attitudes toward AT&T had declined precipitously. The pro- portion who thought that AT&T was "well managed" fell from 65 per- cent prior to the downsizing announcement to just 47 percent in March. Not surprisingly, only 24 percent thought that the company "treats employees well." Nearly half of consumers said that the layoffs had negatively affected their feelings about AT&T. Most troubling, nearly a third (32 percent) said that the layoffs would decrease the quality and reliability of the company's long-distance service. Of course, the company also had its defenders-some of them or- ganized and equipped by us, and others who jumped in on their own simply because they saw larger issues in play. Columnists such as William Safire at the New York Times, George Will and James Glass- man at the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson in Newsweek, and Mi- chael Prowse in the Financial Times wrote contrarian stories that defended the company. Economist Herb Stein, reengineering guru Michael Hammer, his coauthor James Champy, and ethicist Marjorie Kelly wrote su