d chance that when the writedown was announced, it would have been in the name of two companies, AT&T and Lucent Technologies, as the equipment com- pany came to be known in February of 1996; in fact, Lucent accounted for more than half the jobs eliminated. Because we failed to appreciate the symbolism behind the facts, one of the most decent men I know, Bob Allen, was unfairly portrayed as the symbol of corporate greed. But we learned. Whereas Allen was suspicious of anything that looked like grand- standing, Armstrong was a master of the symbolic gesture. One of his first acts as CEO was to ban chauffeur-driven commutation for top executives. It was a popular move with rank-and-file employees, and it even made the business pages as a sign of how serious he was about cutting costs and changing the culture. In fact, exactly one executive commuted to work by company car at the time. Already slated to re- tire, she was driven to and from the office until her last day. Recalling Allen's lambasting, Armstrong froze executive salaries when he announced the elimination of 18,000 jobs in January 1998. Even more important, though, this would be the last time we aggre- gated downsizing information for the media. From then on, we did our downsizing by department, providing the companywide numbers only to a very few executives who needed them to ensure that we were complying with SEC requirements for documenting accounting charges. And we tried to express downsizing targets in financial terms rather than as changes in workforce (reductions in overhead costs or increases in sales per employee, for example). This Too Shall Pass During this period, Bob Allen received direct encouragement from other CEOs as their "club" rallied around a beleaguered member. Jack Understand the Power of Symbols Welch wrote a note telling Allen to "hang in there" and reminding him that Welch himself had been known as "Neutron Jack" before GE started producing the predictable earnings growth that his downsiz- ings made possible. Chris Galvin of Mot