omeone had finished, urg- ing that person to go on. The quickest way to lose his confidence was to roll over when he challenged you. I can attest from personal experi- ence that he respected people who disagreed with him openly-even heatedly-as long as their arguments were logical and fact-based. He quickly tired of people who whined or lacked conviction. He was highly competitive, pushing people to accelerate their deadlines or raise their targets, but when things went wrong, he was not inclined to waste time finding people to blame. Uncharacteristically for someone brimming with such confidence, Armstrong was the exception to Galbraith's Law that "faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." Given a new set of facts, Armstrong would confidently change course. However, as we will see, he wasn't always quick to admit that he had done so, no matter what the compass readings said. He was not the kind of CEO who hated to be given bad news, and he had no trouble distinguishing between the message and the messenger. He simply ignored setbacks, focusing on fixing the problem and moving on. He was not naturally suspicious of those around him; he might question their competence, but he sel- dom questioned their motives. In fact, in view of later events, one could argue that he was too trusting. In his early years at AT&T, he was not particularly sensitive to criticism, striving, in his own words, to "rise above it." But in the end, the sheer quantity of the negative press, some of it highly per- sonal, weighed him down. Whatever calluses he had acquired over the years wore off, exposing raw nerves. At one point, I had brought him such a string of bad news that if I showed up in his office unexpectedly, I could tell from his expression that his stomach had begun to knot. That alarmed me because, by nature, Armstrong was one of the most optimistic people I had ever met. Brimming with confidence, he refused to dwell on problems or let adver