ential part- ners. Once Time Warner signed on, other members of the cable club would fall into line. BT brought with it deep experience and business relationships on the continent of Europe and in Asia. Unfortunately, the BT joint venture began life with outsized expectations, and the one with Time Warner never left the delivery room. Announcing the BT joint venture in July 1998 would be challeng- ing, if only because of the time zones involved. Both companies wanted to make the announcement on their home turf, neither wanted to follow the other, and both wanted to minimize the trading hours between issuing the news release and explaining it to the media and financial analysts. So we devised a schedule that had Zeglis and Bonfield in London, and Armstrong and Vallance in New York. The news release would go out precisely at 2 A.M. in the United States, which was 7 A.M. in London. BT would then hold its analyst meeting at II A.M., and Bonfield and Zeglis would host a news conference at I P.M., both local time. Armstrong would join the London news confer- ence by phone at 8 A.M. his time. Then he and Vallance would host an II A.M. news conference at AT&T's headquarters in New York. The logistics alone gave the announcement a larger-than-life qual- ity. Both news conferences were beamed across the Atlantic, BT ar- ranged for the news release to be translated into dozens of languages as the announcement moved around the world, and the personalities were compelling-besides the four principals, both companies were icons in their respective countries. Many newspapers carried a photo of Bonfield and Zeglis shaking hands with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes behind them, as if they had just signed a peace treaty rather than a business agreement of uncertain size. In fact, when I had gone over to London weeks before to try to finalize the news release, I had had great difficulty finding anyone who could characterize the joint venture in terms of revenue, or "turn- over," as my British colleagues referred to it. Fina