Think like Bill. That was the prime directive for executives at Microsoft – and for its competitors – during the years I covered the company for The Wall Street Journal. It served reporters pretty well, too. Much of what I know about strategy I learned from Bill Gates.
I’ve been thinking about thinking like Bill since Time magazine named him and Melinda, along with Bono, as People of the Year. The cynical reaction is that the honor completes Gates’ rehabilitation from all that nasty antitrust business. It’s true that his philanthropic giving coincided with the government’s legal assault on Microsoft. But it’s also incontrovertible that Gates’ interest and commitment to global health is not only authentic, but visionary and transformative. It’s increasingly clear that Gates will be remembered more for saving lives than for creating Microsoft.
The real meaning of Time’s move goes far beyond Gates or Bono. It’s about the mobilization of resources – the Gates’ money and smarts, Bono’s popularity and moral clarity. It’s about putting muscle behind the Big Idea – ending extreme poverty in our generation, in large part by easing the health burden on the developing world. The goals are clear – world leaders even adopted them in the form of the Millennium Development Goals . And there are implementation plans and even rough budgets. The cost for meeting the goals is a fraction of what’s already been spent on the war in Iraq.
Solving big problems is what Gates does best. The challenges of developing an AIDS vaccine, eradicating malaria, vaccinating every child and correcting the “market failure” that directs 90% of medical research into diseases affecting 10% of the world’s population are if anything more absorbing than harnessing the power of personal computers through software.
Several years ago, I wrote a book about Microsoft that was generally critical of Gates’ leadership of the company in the face of the Internet challenge. But I ended the book on an up note, predicting that like a master player of the card game Hearts. Gates was going to shoot the moon. “I say Gates rises to the new challenge,” I concluded. “I say he goes out a winner.”
I took a lot of grief for that conclusion, coming as it did after a fairly scathing critique. The online magazine Salon called it “ a breathtaking wet kiss for the very same Bill Gates whom Bank has gone to such great lengths to malign” – not that I pay much attention to reviews, of course.
As I meant to explain, and as Gates well understands, shooting the moon ultimately doesn’t have much to do with Microsoft, or software, or even business at all, except insofar as all of those things have enabled him to undertake what he is now doing. Shooting the moon is about putting brainpower and resources to work on solving the world’s biggest problems.
The Time award gives Gates an even stronger mandate to advocate for just that and he has become an effective advocate for the desperately needed global mobilization. Solving problems, saving lives, taking on the big challenges – all of us might do well to think like Bill.
--David Bank
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