21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (26 page)
Read 21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence Online
Authors: Pat Williams
3.
Become a polymath
. Cultivate a wide-ranging curiosity about many subjects; then become an expert in as many subjects as you can. Be a “cross-matrix” problem solver, drawing insight from a range of subject areas. Become conversant in several languages. Never stop learning and growing in your leadership competence. Never lose your intellectual curiosity.
4.
Read good books
. King Solomon said, “Like the horizons for breadth and the ocean for depth, the understanding of a good leader is broad and deep.”
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Jefferson treasured few possessions more than his library. The wisdom that penned the Declaration of Independence and the competence that made him one of our greatest presidents came largely from books.
Leadership authority Brian Tracy once told me that by reading one hour a day, I could read one book per week. A book per week equals 52 books per year or 520 books per decade. “And Pat,” he concluded, “if you read just five books on a specific subject, you can consider yourself a world-class expert on that subject.” There’s an undiscovered territory of knowledge awaiting you in books. Emulate the wisdom of Jefferson, and read for your life.
Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do our fellow-men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step
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T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
B
ILL
G
ATES
Compute—and Compete
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it “tap-dancing to work.”
B
ILL
G
ATES
I
n 2008, I went to Omaha for a speaking engagement. My driver, Walter, was my guide to all the interesting things to see and do around the city. I asked him about some of the notable people he had squired around town, and he said his most fascinating passengers had been Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
“Mr. Gates comes to town a lot,” Walter said. “He and Mr. Buffett are fanatical about playing bridge. They’re great kidders. Once, when I was driving them, Mr. Gates said, ‘Please drive carefully, Walter. You don’t want to have a wreck with the two of us in this limo. It would adversely affect the global economy.’ ”
Gates was joking—but it was no joke. At that time, Warren Buffett was number one on the
Forbes
richest billionaires list and Bill Gates was third.
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William Henry “Bill” Gates III is the cofounder (with Paul Allen) and former CEO of Microsoft, the largest software company in the world. He began his career as one of the most aggressive entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution, and since 2006 he’s been transitioning out of the software business and into full-time philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955, the son of prominent attorney William H. Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. As a boy, he was nicknamed “Trey” after the III in his name. He was curious and competitive from his earliest days. By age eight, he had read the
World Book Encyclopedia
from beginning to end. As an infant, he learned to make his own cradle rock; as a toddler, he loved to rock on a rocking horse; and as an adult, he is famous for sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth to burn off the energy of his constant hyperactivity.
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Bill Gates has said his boyhood home was “a rich environment in which to learn.” It was also a competitive environment, which suited young “Trey” Gates just fine. Biographers James Wallace and Jim Erickson explain:
His competitive fire was ignited early in life and fanned by childhood games, sports, and the driving ambition of his parents. Whether racing with his older sister to finish a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle, playing pickleball at the family’s annual tournament, or swimming laps with his friends at the country club pool, Gates loved competing—and winning. Just as importantly, he hated losing….
A friend who knew Gates in his early teens said: “Bill loved playing pickleball and was fiercely competitive. He loved playing tennis and was fiercely competitive. He loved waterskiing and was fiercely competitive. Everything he did, he did competitively.”
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Bill attended Lakeside School, an exclusive prep school in Seattle, when he was thirteen. The Lakeside Mothers Club held a rummage sale to fund a computer terminal and rent computer time on a General Electric mainframe. This was in 1968, long before most schools ever considered providing computer education. Bill took an interest in writing and running programs in the BASIC computer language. Paul Allen, who was two years older than Bill, also spent time in the computer room. They became close friends.
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The decision of the Lakeside Mothers Club to support computer education was, at that time, an odd one. In the mid-1960s, few people gave any thought to computers. You might have expected the group to donate books or an overhead projector—but the Lakeside Mothers Club showed amazing foresight. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had their imaginations fired up by what computers could do—and they soon acquired more programming expertise than most university undergrads studying computer science at that time. If not for the Lakeside Mothers Club, Microsoft might not exist today.
“There was just something neat about the machine,” Gates recalled in 1996, reflecting on his grade-school fascination with the computer. His skill as a programmer improved to the point where the company that owned the mainframe computer hired him and his friends to write a payroll program.
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When Lakeside administrators heard about Bill’s aptitude for computer programming, they selected him to write a program for matching students to classes. The administrators did not anticipate the evil genius of young Bill Gates. He exploited his knowledge of computer code to rig his own class schedule. As Gates later recalled, “I had no classes at all on Fridays. And even better, there was a disproportionate number of interesting girls in all my classes.”
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He recalled:
I can directly trace the founding of Microsoft back to my earliest days [at Lakeside]…. Instead of teaching us about computers in the conventional sense, Lakeside just unleashed us.
The experience and insight Paul Allen and I gained…gave us the confidence to start a company based on this wild idea that nobody else agreed with—that computer chips were going to become so powerful that computers and software would become a tool that would be on every desk and in every home.
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In 1970, fifteen-year-old Bill Gates formed a partnership with seventeen-year-old Paul Allen. They called their new venture Traf-O-Data. Their homemade computer system tabulated traffic flow data so that city engineers could better program traffic lights. The two boys paid a Boeing engineer to help with the hardware design. They purchased one of Intel’s latest microprocessor chips, the 8008, and connected a paper-tape reader to their homemade computer. The system worked brilliantly in practice runs. But when Bill invited a city official over for a demonstration, the computer crashed. As the official turned to leave, Bill turned to his mother and pleaded, “Tell him, Mom, tell him it really works!”
In the end, Gates and Allen landed several clients. Their Traf-O-Data company grossed $20,000 before they folded the venture.
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In 1973, Bill Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard. Encouraged by his parents to pursue a law degree, he chose his class schedule accordingly—but he maintained his passion for computers. He devoted most of his time to Harvard’s computer lab but maintained passable grades by cramming. Meanwhile, his friend Paul Allen dropped out after two years at Washington State, and, at Bill’s urging, moved to Boston and took a programming job at Honeywell.
Paul Allen recalls that Bill Gates engaged in “nightly poker games with the local cardsharps” at Harvard, and in the process he gained “some costly lessons in bluffing; he’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six hundred the next.”
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Those “costly lessons in bluffing” were about to pay handsome dividends.
In December 1974, Paul Allen hurried to Harvard’s Currier House, burst into the dorm room where Bill Gates was cramming for finals, and plunked down the January 1975 issue of
Popular Electronics
. “Check it out!” Allen said. The magazine featured a story on the Altair 8800—the world’s first personal computer.
With Allen listening in, Gates phoned the New Mexico–based manufacturer of the computer, MITS, and said they were creating a version of the BASIC computer language to run on the Altair 8800. The software, Gates said, was just about finished and ready to demonstrate. MITS officials were eager to see a demonstration, but they were still debugging the memory cards for the Altair. They’d be ready for a demo in a month. Gates said their software would be ready around the same time.
Of course, Bill Gates’s pitch to MITS had been pure bluff. All those poker nights hadn’t been wasted after all. They hadn’t written a single line of code. But as soon as Gates got his finals out of the way, they headed for the Harvard computer lab. Working day and night, they figured out how to emulate the Altair 8800 and they produced a version of BASIC that did everything they claimed it would.
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At the appointed time, Gates and Allen flew to Albuquerque and demonstrated the program to the MITS honchos at their Albuquerque strip mall headquarters. MITS offered to set Gates and Allen up in their own office. Soon after that, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and together with Paul Allen, they founded their new software company, headquartered next door to a vacuum cleaner showroom in Albuquerque.
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They founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975—though they didn’t immediately incorporate. At first, the company was “Paul Allen and Bill Gates doing business as Micro-Soft.” The Microsoft (or Micro-Soft) name was Allen’s idea, a combination of “microprocessor” and “software.” In 1995, Gates and Allen recalled those early days in a
Fortune
magazine interview:
GATES: “We put a credit line in the source code of our first product that said, ‘Micro-Soft BASIC: Bill Gates wrote a lot of stuff; Paul Allen wrote some other stuff.’ ”…
ALLEN: “We had talked about a lot of different names back in Boston, and at some point I said, ‘Well, the totally obvious name would be Microsoft.’ ”
GATES: “We also had mentioned names like Outcorporated Inc. and Unlimited Ltd., but we were, you know, joking around. We talked a lot about whether we should call it Allen & Gates, but decided that was not a good idea…. It seemed like a law firm or like a consulting company to call it Allen & Gates. So we picked Microsoft even before we had a company to name.”
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Gates and Allen worked as independent contractors, writing software exclusively for MITS. By late 1976, they had hired employees and were developing software for other computer systems. On January 1, 1979, Microsoft moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington. As Microsoft grew, Gates continued to manage the business end of the company while overseeing quality control for Microsoft products. “In the first five years,” Gates recalled, “I didn’t let any line of code get out of the company that I hadn’t reviewed.”
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HE
P
OWER OF
C
OMPETENT
C
OMPLEMENTARY
P
ARTNERSHIPS
Do you know what “pancake sorting” is? I have to confess, I haven’t a clue. In
Fun with Algorithms
, mathematicians Paolo Boldi and Luisa Gargano define pancake sorting as “sorting algorithms that use prefix-reversals, with focus on upper-bounds on the number of reversals used in sorting an arbitrary permutation.”
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Well, I’ll take their word for it.
In his sophomore year at Harvard, Bill Gates came up with an algorithm for solving mathematical problems using pancake sorting. He later coauthored a paper with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou (who was then at Harvard; now at UC Berkeley). Papadimitriou once described Bill Gates as “the smartest person I’ve ever met.” He explains:
Gates was fascinated with a math problem called pancake sorting: How can you sort a list of numbers, say 3-4-2-1-5, by flipping prefixes of the list?…For a list of
n
numbers, nobody knew how to do it with fewer than 2
n
flips. Bill came to me with an idea for doing it with only 1.67
n
flips. We proved his algorithm correct, and we proved a lower bound—it cannot be done faster than 1.06
n
flips. We held the record in pancake sorting for decades….
Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. He had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: “Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.”
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