“That’s great,” my wife said, but could I please get back in the car and keep driving before the kids woke up?

I did, but I was still on fire. Within days I had, via telephone, redeployed Marc and half my office staff to start working on the details of setting up a phone company. It seemed like taking candy from a baby. I came back from Israel ready to take on the world.

It was an exciting time for us. If a person really believes in something and is willing to exert leadership, anything is possible and everyone will follow no matter how far-fetched the idea. Sometimes, though, these far-fetched “visionary” ideas just don’t work out in the real world. And as I began to turn my dream into a marketable reality, this began to look like one of those times.

First of all, I discovered tremendous resistance on the part of consumers to use a system that they perceived as cumbersome and time-consuming. Some Fortune 500 firms felt it was legally questionable, to boot. People take telephones for granted. Of all the instant things in our society, the telephone is probably the most incredible, and the one we get most annoyed about when there’s any glitch. To have to wait for a callback, or a dial tone, even if it took only nine seconds, was a tough thing to sell. Not only that, but since the people who could really benefit from this were all living and working in Europe, just reaching them to pitch the idea posed a problem. Setting up an international sales force proved to be virtually impossible. Whatever lessons about absentee management I hadn’t fully absorbed from my years in Harvard were now driven home twice as hard, as my sales managers in France and Spain ripped me off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea of callback was brilliant; putting it into practice almost put us under.

A little more than one year after my “revelation” at the Dead Sea I was just about ready to quit the phone business. The year was 1991, and it had been a disaster. My staff was dispirited. This was pure folly.

There were one or two bright spots. The three-man Olympic setup team from NBC was using our system from Barcelona, and we had miraculously secured a small exhibit space at Telecom ’91, the grand international telecommunications show in Geneva. But basically the business was a failure. I told my wife I wanted to quit and skip Geneva. She counseled me to go to Geneva, since the fees we’d paid were nonrefundable and not going would have been throwing money away. “Go to Telecom for the fun of it,” she said. “Get the phone business out of your system, and then if you have to you can quit.” Thus began six days that changed my life, and perhaps the international telecommunications business, forever.