The pressure to deliver short term profits is intense and reaches through every level of the company, cascading down from the Board room to the executive suites to the line managers.

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His was a quintessentially American story -- growing up in Harlem, serving his country in uniform, working his way through law school, and then just breaking down every barrier that he came across.

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It even cleans itself, running hot water through all the lines and nozzles every time you shut it down.

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"Every meeting, everything that we went through, I would write down notes and I came up with a 250-page book on what we were doing, how decisions were being made, everything, " Hopkins said.

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So it happens every now and again that folks scavenging for copper end up cutting through fiberoptic cable, which can shut down phone and data traffic for a limited area.

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