To be frank, at times during the approval process not only did it seem we weren't communicating very well, but sometimes we weren't even talking the same language. They couldn't accept the fact that multiple ISPs were a competitive necessity for the success of our cable business. The need to provide it, whatever the government did or didn't do, was market driven. Too often our conversations begin and end with the regulatory process, and the world we inhabit doesn't operate that way. And the answers aren't in a simplistic agenda of tax cuts or interest rate cuts alone, no matter what short-term boosts they may provide.
Government has to change, but so does business.
Corporations must live up to their obligations to societies that more and more look to them for help in providing education, health services and meaningful employment. At AOL Time Warner, one of our first acts was to change our compensation plans to make as many people as possible into shareholders. Increasingly, we'll be rewarding that way, reinforcing people's sense of working in their own interests. A very long time ago, I discovered that the best employee is the one who comes to work not just to collect a paycheck or fill in the time between waking and sleeping but who wishes to be part of an enterprise that makes a difference in the world. At the outset of my conversations with Steve Case, we were certain that if our merger was worth doing at all, it was because both companies had a deeply imbedded sense of mission that went beyond the confines of conventional business.