of their own company's strategic posi- tion. It's Okay to Change Your Mind If you need to announce a fundamental change in strategy, re- member that neither the media nor your company's stakeholders were on the journey that led to your decision. It will take time to bring them up to speed. Don't complicate matters by asking them to pretend that nothing has changed. Popular wisdom may be wrong, but picking a fight over it will only cost you your credibil- ity. Sometimes it's better to be smart than right. Loose Ends If AT&T were a sweater, anyone who knew where to look would have seen the first threads beginning to unravel in the summer of 2000. Why it unraveled has been debated by journalists, pundits, and busi- ness school classes ever since. The man who knit the sweater, how- ever, argued that it hadn't unraveled at all-he had merely redistributed the yarn, turning a comfortable cardigan into several snappier vests. Some of us even allowed ourselves to believe it. And therein lay another lesson: To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the only difference between genius and self-delusion is that genius has its limits. AT&T's chief financial officer in 2000, Chuck Noski, was given to neither self-delusion nor wishful thinking. Fresh from the character- building experience of revising the company's earnings forecast for 2000, by midsummer Noski was sorting through the first estimates for 200I. They were not pretty. Sales of the company's most profitable Tough Calls service-long-distance voice-were declining at an even faster rate than anyone had predicted. As more long-distance calls moved to wire- less networks or became e-mail messages, Sprint had introduced a new five-cents-a-minute calling plan in a desperate effort to goose usage. AT&T and MCI were forced to match it, but the new low rates did nothing to stimulate more calling. And the company's economic models indicated that things would only get worse when the Bells began offering long-distance service, even if they didn't introduce lower prices. On average, when AT