 is a sense of shared sacrifice. If Allen had announced that AT&T's top execs and members of its board of directors were donating some of their salaries and fees to a fund for the fired employees, it wouldn't make much financial difference. But it would make a huge symbolic difference."12 He was right-it would have made a difference. But because we didn't do it, the New York Times could dub AT&T's chairman a symbol of "corporate avarice." 13 Our carefully crafted messages had focused on demonstrating that our separation benefits were among the best in industry. That, of course, was beside the point. We were trapped in a period of piling on, with the media compet- ing with one another to tell the same story from different angles and to tie all their stories to the same theme: corporations' lack of social responsibility and the shocking disparity between the compensation of senior executives and that of rank-and-file workers. AT&T now suf- fered from a presumption of guilt that not only made recovery more difficult but magnified the impact of any missteps. The next hit came in late February 1996, when the company issued its proxy for 1995 and tacitly confirmed Buchanan's hypothesis. Bur- ied in the section on executive compensation was a paragraph reveal- Tough Calls ing that, months before the downsizing had been decided (much less announced), the board of directors had given AT&T's most senior of- ficers significant option grants as an incentive to complete the restruc- turing successfully. Although they couldn't be exercised for four years, the options were potentially worth millions. For example, by the ar- cane formulas of the Black-Scholes method of valuing options, the company's proxy said that Allen's special 1995 grant was worth about $9.7 million.14 That stimulated a new round of stories, and this time there were six negative stories for every neutral one. The Council of Institutional Investors, which represents over IOO public and private pension funds, prepared a report on the AT&T layoffs that conclude