Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
I've been struck by the role that technology plays and especially that the Internet played during this crisis. On September 11th hundreds of millions of people relied on the Internet to get news and to communicate with loved ones.
Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.
Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.
The flatter the corporate hierarchy, the more likely it is that employees will communicate bad news and act upon it.
Newspaper readership is still growing in India.
I set a rule that people weren't allowed to send good news unless they sent around an equal amount of bad news. We had to get a balanced picture. In fact, I kind of favored just hearing about the accounts we were losing because ... bad news is generally more actionable than good news.
The willingness to hear hard truth is vital not only for CEOs of big corporations but also for anyone who loves the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds like bad news, but it is just what we need.
Convert bad news to good news.
Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.
Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.
We went down to Apple to talk to them about putting QuickTime into our media player,
We don't think there'll be a huge swing to one model at the expense of the other.
We are trying to put a 'services plus software' mentality into many of the product groups inside Microsoft.
These proposals will have a chilling effect on innovation in the high technology industry, ... Microsoft could never have developed Windows under these rules. Looking forward, this kind of regulation would make it impossible for Microsoft to develop the next generation of great software.