CTRL+Z: Rewritten

In 1980, the most respected executive in America needed a successor. Reginald Jones ran General Electric, a company of 400,000 employees and the last original member of the Dow, and he chose by calling each finalist into his office and asking the same question: you and I die in a plane crash, so who should run the company? Jones picked Jack Welch. Wall Street crowned him Manager of the Century, ev...

4th of July Episode! In 1776, one British general had George Washington cornered. Washington's army was trapped on a strip of high ground in Brooklyn, its back to a river with no boats, beaten and out of room. General William Howe's officers begged him to storm the position and end the revolution that afternoon. He told them to wait, and two nights later a storm and a fog let the entire rebel forc...

In 1991, the men around Mikhail Gorbachev spent two years begging him to send in the army and hold the Soviet Union together. He had already ordered three crackdowns that left unarmed civilians dead, but when it came time to crush the republics for good, he refused. By the end of that year the largest empire on earth had dissolved, and in Russia they have cursed his name ever since. It almost went...

In 1981, a study Kodak paid for and signed told the company that digital photography would kill film within a decade. Kodak read its own warning and used it to squeeze a few more years out of film instead. The company that invented the digital camera filed for bankruptcy in 2012. It almost went the other way. Kodak got two clean chances to undo the same mistake, the first in 1981 and a second in 1...

In 216 BC, at a place in southern Italy called Cannae, Hannibal destroyed the largest army Rome had ever raised, tens of thousands killed in a single afternoon. With the capital nearly defenseless, he chose not to march on it. That restraint let a broken Rome survive, and the Republic that lived went on to build the Western world. It almost went the other way. Hannibal's own cavalry commander, Mah...

In December 2000, the Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount and let George W. Bush's 537-vote lead stand. Those votes, out of nearly six million cast, decided Florida, and Florida decided the presidency. It almost went the other way. Seven of the nine justices agreed the count was broken. They split on the fix. Five voted to stop. Four voted to send it back, set one standard, and finish. The man...

In October 1555, a dying Charles the Fifth split the largest empire in Europe between two heirs. Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the silver of the New World went to his son Philip. The imperial crown, plus Austria and the lands to the east, went to his brother Ferdinand. The most powerful man in Christendom looked at everything he held and cut it in half. He almost didn't. Years earlier, Charle...

In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that Hollywood's five biggest studios had been running an illegal monopoly. People remember the case as the government ordering the studios to sell their theaters. That's not what happened. The Court banned the worst practices, sent the theater question back to a lower court for a fresh look, and left the door open. Howard Hughes walked through it in the wrong dire...

On October 20th, 1980, Ronald Reagan wrote the president of the air traffic controllers' union a letter calling their working conditions "deplorable" and promising his administration would fix them. PATCO endorsed him three days later. It was the first time the union had ever backed a Republican. Ten months into his presidency, 11,400 controllers walked off the job. Reagan gave them forty-eight ho...

In October of 2016, Bob Iger was 48 hours from buying Twitter for $15 billion. Both boards had approved. The lawyers were drafting. Goldman Sachs was working the weekend. Then Iger went through the user data one more time, read his own notifications, and couldn't sleep. Sunday morning he typed an email to his board with the subject line "cold feet," called Jack Dorsey, and killed the deal. Twenty-...

On a computer, Control Z is the undo button. When you press it, whatever you just typed gets reversed and allows you to make a different decision. What if you could press control Z on some of the biggest decisions in history?

In November of 1095, a sixty-year-old French pope stood in a field outside the cathedral of Clermont and gave the most consequential speech of the Middle Ages. Eight months earlier, ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor had asked him for a few thousand professional knights to help fight the Seljuk Turks. Standard contract work. Urban II sat with the request through the summer, then walked outside...

In September of 2000, three guys from a tiny DVD-rental startup called Netflix flew to Dallas on a chartered jet they couldn't afford to make a pitch to the most powerful video rental chain on Earth. Reed Hastings asked Blockbuster CEO John Antioco for fifty million dollars. Antioco's mouth twitched at the corner. His general counsel told the room the dot-com hysteria was overblown. The Netflix gu...

In April of 1979, the Chicago Bulls had a coin flip against the Los Angeles Lakers for the first pick in the NBA Draft. The Bulls' marketing department had run a fan vote on what to call. Heads won. Bulls GM Rod Thorn, who'd called tails his entire life, looked down at the marketing handout and said heads. The coin came up tails. The Lakers got Magic Johnson. The NBA you know was built on what cam...

In December of 1936, King Edward VIII signed a piece of paper that changed a thousand years of British monarchy. He gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée his government refused to accept as queen. His brother Bertie became George VI. Bertie's daughter became Queen Elizabeth II. The House of Windsor you know exists because of what Edward signed that day. He almost didn't...

In December 1989, NBC had a pilot nobody wanted. "The Seinfeld Chronicles" had tested as one of the worst pilots in network history, the president of entertainment called it "too New York, too Jewish," and Fox had already passed. The show was dead. Then a specials executive named Rick Ludwin canceled a Bob Hope special on his own budget and used the money to order four more episodes, the smallest...

On December 10, 1996, Apple was months from bankruptcy and out of options. Two men flew to Cupertino to pitch their software as the company's last hope, Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Jobs. Apple picked Jobs and used the software he brought with him to build the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Store, and the iPhone. But what if Gassée hadn't phoned it in? What if Apple picked the other guy and Steve Jobs...

On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced his resignation rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal. Barry Goldwater told him he had 15 votes. He needed 34. So he quit. But what if he didn't? What if Nixon told Goldwater to go to hell and forced the United States Senate to remove him? The trial would have been the biggest television event in American history, playing out during a midt...