 to be spun off and the vultures to descend on the rest of the company. Meanwhile, the AT&T board had not taken steps to clarify the leadership of AT&T after Armstrong. The period between December 2001 and July 2002, when Dorman was officially named Armstrong's successor, represented a leadership vac- uum that we should never have allowed. When my arguments that Armstrong shouldn't move to Comcast fell on deaf ears, I urged him to prod the board to name a successor as quickly as possible. However, Armstrong didn't want to be a lame duck if the Comcast merger ran into regulatory problems. As it turned out, that's exactly how he was seen almost from the day of the merger announcement. He lost SO much credibility with AT&T employees that Dorman often refused to be seen with him in front of large gatherings, even canceling his participation in a meeting with retired senior officers because Armstrong would be there. Senior managers began to ques- tion the allocation of debt between AT&T Broadband and the rest of the company, fearing that the long-distance businesses would be bur- dened with obligations that should be going to Comcast. Operating managers began sniping about the terms of inter-unit contracts for using each other's facilities. By January 2002, the board of directors acknowledged that the in- terests of the long-distance and broadband businesses would diverge over the coming months. It passed a resolution requiring the full board to review any changes in operating budgets, capital plans, asset allocations, interentity agreements, or anything else that could repre- sent a conflict between the units' interests. But the board's action didn't set people's minds at ease. The basic problem was that the people in AT&T's core businesses had lost their sense of mission. For months, they had been told that their businesses were either "unsustainable" in the new digital age or "uncompetitive" compared to MCI WorldCom. The solution they had been given was to diversify into adjacent industries, such as wireless and ca