s willing to risk mistakes, reasoning that they could be repaired, but a missed opportunity in this fast-changing industry was gone for- ever. Closeting himself with his senior team for ninety days was not just a means of educating himself on the business and its leaders; it was also a calculated attempt to break through organizational walls. By putting everyone in the same room, he pulverized the old channels of thinking. And he used the "come-back" as an expression of urgency. While Armstrong's leadership style had an ad hoc appearance, it put pressure on an organization where, in the words of one consul- tant, "the road to advancement has often been paved with negation, that is, clever reasons for not doing things, not being responsive and not being bold." Armstrong himself complained that AT&T excelled at one-stop shopping-no matter what the question, no one could say yes, but anyone could say no. By literally putting significant questions to a vote, he brought to an end the days of "going along by humming along." Armstrong also knew that he couldn't depend exclusively on mid- dle managers-who were most tightly ensnarled in those competing threads and therefore most resistant to change-to bring his strategy to the general body of employees. To some extent, he had to do it himself if only to model the communications behavior he expected from his senior team and others. Knowing that there would be multi- ple demands on his calendar, we set a specific budget for the time he would devote to "leadership communications" as distinct from "busi- ness operations." In all, he would spend the equivalent of four or five days a month (20 to 25 percent of his time) in communications- focused activities. At least half of that time would be devoted to inter- nal communications, as opposed to meetings with financial analysts, reporters, or public officials or giving outside speeches. Our theory was that in the early days, re-building external confi- dence in AT&T was less important than mobilizing the employees, who would hav