rything by the book, especially after a di- sastrous period in the late 1990s when relentless downsizing had con- tributed to a series of highly publicized network failures. The people in Business Services had a sales culture and were typi- cally at war with the internal organizations responsible for developing the services they sold or for installing and maintaining them. While he never completely understood AT&T's culture (and had an Tough Calls especially tin ear for its consumer business), Armstrong instinctively knew that its strongest strands ran through a Gordian knot of some- times competing mental models and patterns of behavior. Somehow, he had to move all the people of AT&T in the same direction by pulling on the strands that tied them together without becoming ensnared in the threads of competing interests. He began with his most senior team. Ninety-Day Retreat After Armstrong arrived in November of 1997 he literally put the top fifteen operational and functional managers in a windowless confer- ence room and told us that we wouldn't leave until we figured out what it would take to make AT&T a great global communications com- pany. It took ninety days even though some of us went in there think- ing that we already were a great global communications company. By now, Marilyn Laurie had told Armstrong of her plans to retire and I succeeded her as executive vice president of public relations. We met around a U-shaped table from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. nearly every day with only a brief break to grab a sandwich from a table set up in a corner of the room. There were no other time-outs unless Arm- strong's secretary brought in a message that he had an important phone call. The ostensible agenda for these meetings was a review of the cur- rent year's operating results and the next year's plan. Normally, that would take a day. Under Armstrong, it took weeks as he taught us the importance of "drilling down." If the consumer long distance busi- ness was projecting an average price decline, he wanted to know the prices