frustrating combination of strengths and weaknesses. A PR counselor's job is to provide peripheral vision and some grounding in reality. The board of directors' job is to ensure that the team surrounding the CEO compensates for, and doesn't exacerbate, his or her weaknesses. John Walter The afternoon of October 17, 1996, was unseasonably warm, and Mar- ilyn Laurie was sitting on the patio outside her Basking Ridge, New Jersey, office when I showed up in response to her phone call. "I just spent three hours with our new president," she said. had been expecting her call. The media were full of speculation about the search for Mandl's successor. The latest two names that had been added to the list of potential candidates were Mike Armstrong, a former IBM executive and the current CEO of Hughes Electronics, and William Esrey, the CEO of Sprint. The others included George Fisher, the CEO of Kodak, and James McInerney, the head of General Electric's lighting division, who was on everyone's list of potential CEOs while he waited for Jack Welch to pick his eventual successor. One favorite, James Barksdale, the CEO of Netscape, had publicly taken himself out of the running (although he had reportedly sug- Tough Calls gested that he would take the job if AT&T bought his fledgling In- ternet browser company). Such was the caliber of the talent that Allen and his two search firms, Spencer Stuart and Korn Ferry, were reportedly considering. My own money was on Fisher, who had begun his career as a Bell Labs scientist before moving to Motorola, where he ultimately became CEO before leaving for Kodak. His record at the giant photography company had been mixed, and I thought he would be more comfort- able, and more successful, at the helm of a communication services company. The search itself had taken on a new urgency ever since AT&T had announced in September that it expected third- and fourth-quarter earnings to be as much as IO percent below analysts' expectations because of intense price competition in communication service