 By the time we realized that public disclosure of the option grants would come on the heels of the downsizing announcement, those grants had already been given to Allen (and the other top officers). Allen was in no mood to buckle under media criticism by giving the award back. But we should have seen a hint of what was to come as far back as the September 1995 news conference we held to explain the Trivestiture restructuring. The very first question at that news conference was about layoffs, and we were frankly not prepared for it. In a remarkable example of focusing on the wrong issue, we had spent much more time worrying about how people would react to our spinning off Bell Labs with the new equipment company. All the news release said about layoffs was, "It is likely that the combined new companies will have fewer employ- Understand the Power of Symbols ees than the present AT&T." In retrospect, we should have pressed for more information. Certainly one of our investment bankers had run "what-if" calculations. In fact, within days after the announcement, the Wall Street Journal was speculating that 20,000 people would be laid off.25 When Adele Ambrose, my media relations vice president, was quoted as saying that that number was probably too high, a very senior officer called and quietly warned her not to go SO far out on a limb. Meanwhile, the official word she was getting from Finance and Human Resources was that we still didn't know. The other big piece of the puzzle that we missed was that our nega- tive press was not about ideas, it was about feelings. No rational argu- ments, no matter how persuasively arrayed, could dislodge those feelings. They could not even be countered with emotional arguments of our own. As Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion, symbols "do not stand for specific ideas but for a sort of truce or junction between ideas" in which "feeling flows to conformity rather than toward critical scrutiny."26 Once Pat Buchanan had portrayed Bob Allen as the symbol of the corporate greed respo