ble. But now those adjacencies were gone, and they were left with the same Reimagine Your Company's Mission mix of unsustainable, uncompetitive businesses. Plus, the guy at the top was bugging out. An employee survey that we fielded in March and April of 2002 showed that only 20 percent of the employees in AT&T Classic be- lieved that the company was "headed in the right direction" or had any "confidence in the senior management of AT&T." I had participated in previous efforts to launch a "new AT&T," first after the company's manufacturing subsidiaries were spun off in 1996, then when John Walter joined in 1997, and again when Arm- strong took over in 1998. I did not have the heart to launch the new, new, new, new AT&T. Besides, the previous efforts had been resound- ingly unsuccessful, particularly as a means of compensating for more negative news coverage about downsizing, CEO greed, and bungled executive succession. But that was the wrong lesson to draw from those abortive efforts. Their focus had been external. They were de- signed to convince the outside world that it had underestimated the company. Unless it is preceded by an effective internal effort, any such positioning program is built on sand. No one outside the company will believe a message that is not reflected in her day-to-day experi- ences with the company. And no one inside the company will believe a message that does not comport with what he sees on the job every day. What AT&T needed in early 2002 was an internal effort to reimag- ine the company's mission. For four years, AT&T's focus had been on financial issues, from cutting costs, to divesting assets, to acquiring companies, and finally to spinning off those companies in a massive restructuring that seemed to bring most of the company's employees back to the starting point. In the meanwhile, AT&T's people had forgotten why we were in business. The sense of mission that had animated the company's workforce for the first century of its exis- tence-universal service, giving as many people as 