97, IOO AT&T shares were worth about $4,487. By December 2002, when Armstrong left the company, they had become 30 shares of AT&T, worth about $600; 48 shares of Comcast, worth about $1,575; and 48 shares of AT&T Wireless, worth about $405. That represents an annual decline of about 8.8 percent, not taking divi- dends into account. Fidelity's Select Telecom Fund, by contrast, de- creased 9.4 percent a year. Of course, someone who traded in and out of the stock during these years might have done far better (or woefully worse), and no one knows how that basket of stocks will fare in the future. In fact, part of the basket will be cashed out at $720 (pretax) when Cingular Wireless completes its acquisition of AT&T Wireless. And stock of the long-distance company, which was dropped from the closely watched Dow Jones average in April 2004, continued to slide toward the low to mid-teens in the months that followed. But all that assumes that a company's primary purpose is to opti- mize its share price. If Armstrong's mandate was to "give AT&T a future," we probably deserve no more than an "incomplete with an explanation." Many people expected Armstrong to transform AT&T into something bigger and more powerful. But whether AT&T will Practice Ambidextrous Leadership 259 survive as an independent company is at best an even proposition. Its consumer division continues to shrink in size and profitability, al- though at a slower rate. From around $26 billion in revenue in 1997, it ended 2003 with sales of about $9.5 billion. When the consumer long-distance business finally stabilizes, AT&T will probably be little more than a niche player in residential communications services. AT&T's corporate services division is better positioned, thanks to extensive investments during Armstrong's tenure that went largely unnoticed, and unreported, by most observers. But in the long term it will be an attractive acquisition target for the Bell companies, whose own traditional businesses are declining. With revenue of more than $25 billion i