 operator's "landing charges" entirely. There were call back services that turned a call from Africa to the United States into a call from the United States to Africa, taking advantage of the lower U.S. rates. And if it cost less to originate a call to France from Sweden than from the United States, they would route calls through that country. Armstrong did not have the solution for all these threats but, as John Zeglis once pointed out to a reporter who was trying to under- stand the management dynamic of these early days, "we had lots of ideas of our own."2 Armstrong was a sponge who soaked up all those ideas, drilled through them to bedrock and then systematically knitted a strategy around them. He was relentless, uninhibited by any pre- conceptions of what was taboo. In hindsight, his early decisions amounted to picking low-hanging fruit-cut costs, end the money- losing effort to resell local telephone service, stop investing in analog switching, establish a physical link to our best customers, and increase consumer long distance's margins to fund an expansion of the wire- less and data businesses. Risk Takers Few of these decisions were without risk. For example, I argued that we should not commit to eliminating jobs without first deciding how we were going to get the work done with a smaller workforce. Arm- strong decreed that the only way managers would figure out how to get along with fewer people was by giving them fewer people. Besides, Work Inside Out Toward Your Customers Human Resources chief Hal Burlingame had come up with an early retirement incentive that could make the process virtually painless. The actuaries had warned that the plan might prove SO popular that we would have to put limits on who could take it. Nearly every other decision carried similar risks, described in gory detail by managers who had been taught to imagine the worse and then plan for it until there was no longer a need to take the risk in the first place. Armstrong's willingness to take calculated risks was precisely the opp