- pressed strong confidence in senior management and 58 percent be- lieved the company was moving in the right direction. Armstrong had succeeded in beginning to build a strong internal base for the changes ahead. We know now that it did not hold. This page intentionally left blank Don't Let Plugging Leaks Become an Obsession Whether they spring from carelessness or from a malicious streak, leaks complicate a company's life. But some CEOs let leaks drive the timing-and sometimes the substance-of their decision making. No one purposely sets sail on a leaky vessel, but adopting a Queeg-like obsession with leaks won't plug them, and it could run the ship aground. Projects Paris and Flower By the middle of 1998, Armstrong's conversations with John Malone of TCI and Iain Vallance of BT had evolved into full-fledged projects with code names, blackout lists, and squads of investment bankers and lawyers who would periodically take over a floor at the Wachtell Lipton law firm. The code names were intended to disguise the projects' true pur- poses if anyone happened to see one of the presentations the bankers were churning out. The blackout lists were supposed to identify the only people who were authorized to know that Project Paris was the merger discussions with TCI (Italy) and Project Flower was a pro- posed joint venture with British Telecom (Thistle) or, as it preferred to be known, BT. AT&T was respectively "Brazil" and "Violet." Armstrong was worried that news of one or both of these deals would leak, but after Grubman's January note, he was particularly Tough Calls paranoid that rumors of the cable deal would sink the company's shares before he had a chance to explain it. Besides, both deals had already taken 18o-degree turns, and no one was betting that this wouldn't happen again. The discussions with Malone had started as an exploration of ways in which the two companies might partner to meet their respective objectives. AT&T needed access to TCI's custom- ers and hoped to ride its cables, offering phone service