PROLOGUE A Citizen of the World

HE ALMOST MISSED CLASS.

Steve Lewis arrived on the Harvard campus on a clear, cold February morning in 2010, minutes before the start of class, just slightly out of breath. Second-year business school students were already in their seats—talking, opening laptops, reviewing their notes—as Lewis came in hurriedly and sat down to observe. The class would be discussing a brand-new case study written about his young company, a startup with the lofty goal of building a state-of-the-art smart city in Portugal.

Toward the end of the class, Lewis took his place in front of the room with a noticeable lack of notes, papers, briefcase, or burden of any kind. He placed his iPhone next to the water glass and began to tell his story—the story of founding a company called Living PlanIT.

It had been an ordinary week for Lewis—five countries in two days—that included meetings with government officials and business executives, panels, interviews, and keynote speeches, followed by a quick hop to the United States to give several talks, including at Harvard Business School. Lewis had been giving lectures for years, especially when he was a senior executive at Microsoft, so why was he out of breath?

"I call myself a 'world citizen,'" he says with a chuckle, "which means I don't always carry the correct papers." Lewis, actually a citizen of the United Kingdom, was on his way through immigration at New York's JFK Airport when he was told he didn't have the correct visa. Some years earlier he had applied to renew his green card, but he missed the deadline for reapplication. By the time a judge issued a summary deportation notice, Lewis had left the country, so immigration officials on the ground in February 2010 would not let him enter the United States. They drove him around the perimeter of the airport to a holding room. Asked if he had any relatives in the country, Lewis supplied two names. Immigration officials first called his son, Christian Lewis, who thought the call was a prank. "I have no idea who he is," Christian retorted and hung up. They then called his stepdaughter, a US Marine, but she was on a base in San Diego and could not be reached. At that point, Lewis admits, "it was looking a bit dodgy."

Here's where his story takes a bizarre turn—and reveals much about the founder of the future-building company at the center of this book. Lewis had been held for so long that the airport office was closing. As a detainee, he now had certain rights: a shower, some food, and a rest at a not-so-nearby detention center in New Jersey. Apologetic staff shackled Lewis in handcuffs and leg braces and put him in the back of a van with his luggage, which fortunately held a cell phone. Once in the van, Lewis was able to send texts to friends and thereby contact an acquaintance at the US State Department, who told him they would send a lawyer.

At the detention center, Lewis was strip-searched, and his personal possessions were confiscated. The young official checking him in admitted he had been on the job for only two weeks and did not really know how to enter Lewis's information in the computer or print out the necessary labels for his possessions. "So I had to check myself in," Lewis recalls with irony.

He was put in a large shared cell with long-term immigration detainees, a coin-operated phone box, and a toilet in full view. Some of the guys had been in there for months. Fights broke out over toothbrushes. "They were scary guys," he says. "And there I was, an ex-executive from Microsoft. But I grew up in a rough neighborhood," Lewis explains. "I knew how to handle them."

After many hours a guard announced that they would be deporting Lewis from the United States. Lewis was escorted back to the terminal by four policemen. Then one of the immigration officials who had been helpful the day before came in on his day off to deliver good news: Lewis's papers had come through from the State Department. To bypass immigration regulations, Lewis was admitted to the United States on humanitarian grounds. (His passport, Lewis notes, stills bears that stamp on the last page: Admitted for Humanitarian Reasons.) "It was," he says, "my 36 hours in hell."

Did Lewis lose his temper at any point during this humiliating process? Apparently not. In telling the story, he seems to not even consider outrage as a response. His stance is more bemused than shocked. Lewis does not seem to remember the bad guys from the episode—those who were rude or insensitive—but he remembers the ones who were polite and kind.

What really gets him, he explains, is the galling inefficiency of the bureaucracies involved—the poor communication, the splintered data, the siloed agencies (not unlike most modern cities). What drives Lewis forward, we began to realize, is the opportunity to use technology to solve problems that originate between silos. He wants to fix the system. Sometimes, in his desire to problem-solve into the future, he forgets the little things that populate the present—like visas.

Lewis's talk about Living PlanIT in the Harvard Business School class ended, abruptly, like a car running out of gas midjourney. Students stopped typing or scribbling but remained hovered over keyboards and notebooks, unsure that he had, in fact, come to an end. Some looked puzzled; others, eager or amazed; still others, downright skeptical. Was the company viable? What was it? A tech startup? A real estate play? An office park? Was he really going to build a brand-new green city from scratch? The classroom was silent for a moment, but only a moment.

Then the hands shot up in the air.