This series of articles seeks to examine the character attributes of highly successful leaders, regardless of their adherence to a strong faith or moral standard. In presenting these thoughts, Leadership Ministries is not agreeing with or advocating these traits or practices, but rather presents these as ideas for discussion and development in your own leadership journey.
Bill Gates is an American business mogul, software pioneer and co-founder of Microsoft. He became the youngest person ever to earn a billion dollars, which he did in 1987 at the age of 31. With a current worth of $107 billion, he has been ranked as the wealthiest person in the world for 19 of the past 25 years. He stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in 2001 and has since become one of the most generous philanthropists in history.
Gates attended Harvard University but quit during his junior year. Enthralled by an Altair computer he read about in Popular Electronics magazine, he and friend Paul Allen started a company to write programs for the emerging technology, which they named “Micro Soft” (eventually modernizing to Microsoft). Five years later, he signed an exclusive deal with IBM to provide the operating system for their new personal computer. In 1983 he launched Windows, which has become the most widely used computer software in the world.
By licensing the operating system to IBM in the late 1970s, Bill Gates ensured his software was inside the majority of computers worldwide for years to come. Today about 75% of all computers run on Microsoft Windows. Photo: Microsoft
Though he met regularly with senior managers and programmers, many remember Gates as combative. He gained a reputation for being distant from others; an industry executive complained in 1981 that “Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls.”[1] Under Gates’ leadership, Microsoft became the most dominant software company in the world, leading to antitrust litigation in 1998.
Empower others. At Microsoft, gates practiced “intellectual stimulation”, encouraging others to come up with ideas and creative solutions for problems. Among the notable things about Gates’ leadership in software is that he did not begin his ascent to leading one of the world’s biggest companies by developing his own products, but rather by purchasing core technologies from other companies.
As Microsoft CEO, Gates organized his employees by pooling their interests and putting them into teams. He gave them great latitude in determining their work processes, but held regular meetings to get progress updates and establish deadlines. He made it a point to know the individual names of employees and would thank them one at a time for their efforts instead of just high-fiving “the whole team”. He was quick to criticize weak presentations and poor results, but also insisted employees receive constant training to stay up to date on industry changes. As a result of empowering employees, turnover at Microsoft was very low during Gates’ tenure.
Treat everything as a business. Gates enjoyed writing code as a hobby before he founded Microsoft. However at the company he treated software as a business—every effort had to become profitable in a reasonable timeframe. He was quick to adapt to changes in the industry and consistently focused on market share, no matter what the application. First was the Microsoft Office suite of products, bundled together so that customers who wanted a word processor would also get Microsoft’s spreadsheet and email software, ensuring all of their computing was done under Microsoft’s umbrella. Later when the Internet started to grow, he incorporated a web browser into the Windows operating system, ensuring that nearly everyone who used Windows would use Microsoft’s browser to access the web.
In his philanthropy, Gates allows benefactors to evaluate how the organization spends its finances. Such a move gives accountability as opposed to the privacy of most private organizations. Being a change agent, Gates allowed stakeholders to scrutinize the foundation’s financial records to determine how efficiently the funds were being used.[2] This unusual business practice opened the floodgates to corporate and individual donations to Gates’ causes by providing a level of transparency that was lacking in most nonprofits.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides food and medical aid to many African nations. The Foundation desires to help the poorest people in the world. Photo: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Do something meaningful with your money. Gates has given away more money to charity than any other person in history. Along with Warren Buffett, he founded “The Giving Pledge”, a commitment by wealthy individuals (including a number of billionaires) to give the majority of their wealth to philanthropic efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already given aware more than $60 billion.[3] He said, “The returns from investing in poor people are just as great as the returns from investing in the business world... and have even more meaning.”
Gates was inspired by a newspaper article detailing how many children died each year around the world from preventable diseases. His foundation focuses on healthcare and relieving extreme poverty. Among their efforts are eradicating diseases like malaria and AIDS, improving sanitation, widening access to clean water, helping with the production of wheat and rice, funding education for low-income students, and distributing vaccine to third-world countries during the Covid pandemic. Though Gates and his wife divorced in 2021, they continue to run their charitable foundation together.
[1] Freiberger, Paul (August 31, 1981). "Bugs in Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III: How Bad Are They?". Infoworld p. 49. Archived from the original on September 2, 2016. Retrieved February 28,2011.
[2] https://business-essay.com/bill-gates-transformational-leadership-qualities/
[3] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/foundation-fact-sheet
Mark Maynard