"We looked at one another and suddenly the light bulb blinked on."

The very best companies had leaders who were obsessed with the talent issue. They recruited ceaselessly, finding and hiring as many top performers as possible. They singled out and segregated their stars, rewarding them disproportionately, and pushing them into ever more senior positions.

This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management.

Ken Lay: "The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent."

Author of _Creative Destruction_: "We hire very smart people and we pay them more than they think they are worth."

The War for Talent amounts to an argument for indulging A employees, for fawning over them. "You need to do everything you can to keep them engaged and satisfied -- even delighted. Find out what they would most like to be doing, and shape their career and responsibilities in that direction. Solve any issues that might be pushing them out the door ..."

"And yet I can't help thinking the reputation system is less about creating communities of friends than it is about building cults of personality around popular, "reputable" individuals...

What happens to ideas that are smart but unpopular? In a reputation system, it's too easy for them to be exiled, cast beyond the bounds of what the community deems expressible...

WorldCom is planning to file for bankruptcy protection from its creditors by early next week, people briefed on the matter said last night.

The bankruptcy filing would be yet another stage in the disintegration of WorldCom, the nation's second-largest long-distance carrier and operator of the largest Internet data network.

The leader of the Transportation Security Administration, which was established last winter to protect travelers after September 11, was forced out of his job today as questions intensified about whether the agency had moved quickly enough to improve airport security.

The surprise firing of John Magaw, who was under secretary of transportation for security, is the latest indication that his agency has not made enough progress in the huge job of tightening security at the nation's 429 commercial airports.

The dismissal underscores the administration's struggle to achieve its domestic security goals.

"He was eased out. There was a lot of back-room talk about his management style, or lack thereof, ... tending to gold-plate everything."

Robert W. Pittman, chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, resigned under pressure yesterday in the most public repudiation yet of the promises behind the $165 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner.

The departure of Mr. Pittman, 48, who helped build AOL and became one of the merger's most vocal boosters, leaves the combined company almost entirely in the hands of veterans of Time Warner's old-media businesses.

The moves are unlikely to address immediately the biggest questions hanging over AOL Time Warner's stock ... which has fallen more than 70% since the merger.

Richard Parsons, the new chief: "The whole should be, and will be under this management team, greater than the sum of its parts."

AT&T announced yesterday that David W. Dorman, its president, would succeed C. Michael Armstrong as chairman and chief executive beginning next year.

Mr. Armstrong is expected to become chairman of the new AT&T-Comcast cable combination when that deal is completed by the end of this year.

Mike Batt has put a silent 60-second track on the latest "Planets" album, [which] has enraged representatives of the late John Cage. The silence on his group's album clearly sounds uncannily like 4'33", the silence composed by Cage in his prime.

The orders arrive by fax and e-mail 24 hours a day from pharmaceutical companies, government agencies and academic scientists. And every day at Integrated DNA Technologies, an army of machines responds by producing hundreds of batches of microscopic merchandise: custom-designed snippets of genetic material.

"You could buy your own used DNA synthesizer and make whatever you want in the comfort and privacy of your own garage."

"If you can go from a viral DNA sequence on paper to an infectious agent using things you can order out of catalogues, obviously that has big implications for bioterrorism."

"With a little more advancement in technology you could probably make something more complex than polio. Smallpox is probably just two or three years down the road, maybe less."

"You could get one part [of the sequence] from one company and another part from another company and completely circumvent the law."

Yielding to intense political pressure and a stubbornly depressed stock price, the chief executive of Deutsche Telekom, Ron Sommer, resigned today as the head of a company he had sought to transform from a state monopoly into a global communications colossus.