e new pricing that these consultants find is im- mediately reflected in the one-third of contracts that are renegotiated every year. Pricing information zips around the communication ser- vices industry as freely as the bids in a cattle auction. MCI WorldCom's fraud had distorted industry pricing, lowering AT&T's sales by about $5 billion a year. Without it, the proximate cause of the company's restructuring-rapidly declining industry rev- enue-would not have occurred, or, at worst, would have occurred much later. Since the company's profit margins before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization averaged 33 percent during this period, AT&T would have had about $1.7 billion a year in additional profits, all else being equal. AT&T would have been able to service its debt while divesting itself of noncore assets. It would not have broken itself apart. And it could have taken one more run at managing its voice, data, wireless, and cable businesses as a single enterprise, rather than as a loose confederation of affiliated companies. In the real world, of course, you play the cards you're dealt, even if the other player is pulling cards out of his sleeve. We'll never know if Armstrong's strategy would have worked in the long run, because he didn't get a long enough run to find out. AT&T's largest competitor engaged in serial fraud for at least three and a half years, distorting the principal market from which the company de- rived most of the cash to fund its strategy. AT&T in the Armstrong years did not represent a failure of strategy. It did not represent a failure of execution. The company was mugged. AT&T Broadband was spun off from AT&T on November 18, 2002. Dave Dorman became AT&T's chairman and CEO on that day. Two Reimagine Your Company's Mission years later, he had still been unable to reverse the company's inexora- ble slide or to merge it with a stronger partner. Chuck Noski, who at least one analyst credited with "saving the company, retired to rejoin his family in California. He left with a special 