would have to make them fast. (In the end, by the time he left in 2002, only three of the senior managers who were there when he arrived were still on the payroll. He had gone through two chief fi- nancial officers, five heads each of business and consumer services, and three heads each of wireless and broadband services.) Even more importantly, to my mind, he needed to master AT&T's vast bureaucracy and restore a sense of confidence to a badly demoral- ized body of employees. We had been measuring employee attitudes for decades, and we had been advised by researchers who specialized in these things that, after years of downsizing, AT&T was the equiva- lent of a "trauma company," that is, a business that has gone through a major crisis such as a bankruptcy. Employees had very low feelings of job security, did not trust senior management, and got most of their information from what the researcher called the company's "prison- quality rumor mill." Following John Walter's resignation, only IO percent of employees said they had confidence in senior management, our lowest reading ever-even lower than the 45 percent who expressed confidence in management following the disastrous downsizing announcement of January 1996. Whatever his shortcomings, Walter had succeeded in connecting with rank-and-file employees by adopting and giving voice to many of their complaints about AT&T's traditional hierarchy. When he was forced out, employees were left feeling like cards in a deck that was being shuffled. One of my rules of thumb is that half of what employees learn about their own company comes from reading the Tough Calls business media, but that this information is ten times more credible than what they are told by the company itself. Given the year AT&T had just gone through, it was no wonder that employees were shell- shocked. Armstrong had developed his own theories on leading change as CEO of Hughes Electronics. He had joined Hughes when the Cold War ended and defense contracts, its traditional source of revenue, were wit