range strategic choices. There will be smaller PR lessons in these pages, if only be- cause tactics can be informative in themselves. But the more signifi- cant lessons arose as we attempted to navigate the intersection of corporate and public interests, which is every executive's responsi- bility. The business community now labors under a burden that historian Introduction 9 Daniel Boorstin first identified in American politics. Writing about the 1960 presidential elections, Boorstin noted that the communications media had put a higher premium on manufactured events-such as news conferences, photo ops, political debates, and such-than on the substance of public discourse. "Such 'pseudo-events,''' he wrote, "lead to emphasis on pseudo-qualifications." Alas, that describes the focus of the business media in recent years almost perfectly. Meeting quar- terly earnings expectations may be the ultimate "pseudo-event" in American business, conceived by sell-side analysts and propagated by media reaching for an easy headline. And, as Boorstin observed in politics, reality eventually conformed to its manufactured version. The business scandals in the first three years of the millennium began as innocent-enough efforts to "manage earnings" and in some places escalated to wholesale fraud. Even com- panies that were scrupulous in their accounting practices sometimes mortgaged their future to meet short-term targets. And at least some of the productivity improvements of recent years came at the expense of real reductions in the quality of the extended product, as, for exam- ple, anyone who has tried to navigate his way through customer ser- vice telephone trees can attest. Some in the business media have tortured themselves worrying about whether they should have been able to ferret through the phony accounting that was at the root of corporate scandals. (The answer is probably no.) But few have considered the second-order effects of the breathless coverage they gave the so-called New Economy. The Henry Blodgets and Jack Gru