par- ent"7 and was pushed out within nine months, costing AT&T about $25 million in severance payments. Embarrassed, the AT&T board of directors eased Allen aside and started looking for his successor. After a highly publicized three-month search, they settled on the man who many thought should have had the job the first time around. C. Michael Armstrong arrived with sterling credentials, high-wattage energy, no entourage, and, at least initially, only the most basic play in the turnaround playbook-slash costs. Finding a longer-term fix for the company's broken business model would take more time. Imple- menting it would probably take longer than the five years on his con- tract. All that we in public relations could hope to do was to give him time and space as he tried to reinvent the company and guide it toward a healthy future. We faced a classic public relations dilemma. We needed to convince employees, customers, the media, and Wall Street that the company, which was famous for being slow to change, was indeed changing-and fast. At the same time, in order to give the CEO a long enough runway to achieve strategic "lift," we needed to keep a low profile and avoid raising unrealistic short-term expecta- tions. We managed the first task fairly well; unfortunately, it was at the expense of the second. And that was only one of our mistakes. Tough Calls Why I Wrote This Book Someone once said that experience comes from what you do; wisdom, from what you do badly. On that basis alone, I can share hard-won lessons in managing public relations for AT&T during one of the most tumultuous periods in its history. Even if I never made the same mis- take twice, I still have enough mistakes to fill a book. Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for path-breaking work in decision making, once said, "If I had one wish, it is to see organizations dedicating some effort to study their own decision processes and their own mistakes, and to keep track SO as to learn from those mistakes."8 I've tried hard in thes