rt and knowledgeable, and he felt proprietary about the company. What he saw happening at AT&T an- gered him, and daily e-mails from employees in the trenches embold- ened him to dig deeper. He was not going to settle for Elisha's bromides. For his part, Elisha was not going to be pushed around by a re- porter. He lectured Keller on the difference between "documentation" and "reporting." Keller countered that John Walter had been intro- duced as "the next CEO." Elisha shot back that we never said that. Keller persisted: "What made you lose confidence in him?" Exasperated, Elisha fell back on Mark Twain. "When asked if there was a difference between being president and being vice president, [Twain said,] 'Yes, it is like the difference between lightning and light- ning bugs.'" Katcher, who had been quietly doodling on his legal pad, suddenly looked up. Had Walter Elisha just compared John Walter to a lightning But Elisha pressed on. "We became increasingly concerned about whether [John Walter] could provide the intellectual leadership for this Don't Dance to the Music of Your Own Buzz company."2 Katcher scribbled something on his pad, tore the page off, and slid it across to me. What it said was, "There's their headline." I knew I couldn't take it back, but I could avoid helping it spread, SO I stepped out of the conference call very briefly to cancel Elisha's subsequent interviews. That's when I discovered that CNBC was carry- ing the conference call live. Within seconds, John Walter's representa- tive was on my phone, SO angry that he was literally sputtering. I could hear Walter in the background, shouting at the television set. I gamely said that he was being an alarmist. Elisha's offhand comments wouldn't outweigh all the nice things we had said about Walter in the official news release. But we both knew I was wrong. "Lacks intellectual leadership" became the board's reason for pass- ing over John Walter in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Busin