21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (27 page)

There is no denying Bill Gates’s technical brilliance, but Paul Allen’s contribution to the early success of Microsoft has been grievously underreported. Their friendship was complex, and their personalities were sometimes complementary and other times at odds.

Bill Gates was the extrovert, the driven monomaniac, the hardheaded, uber-competitive son of a successful lawyer. Paul Allen was introverted and laid-back, the technical innovator, the studious son of a librarian. Though both Gates and Allen wanted to make money and both were tech geeks from the get-go, Gates had the business instincts of a shark while Allen was closer to, say, a starfish.

Yet Paul Allen pulled off some huge business coups of his own. When Steve Jobs’s Apple II appeared in 1977, it was powered by a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor—and Microsoft had no software that could run on that processor. Paul Allen devised a plug-in card for the Apple II that enabled Microsoft products to run on Apple computers.

Paul Allen pulled off an even bigger coup in 1981, when IBM sought an operating system for its personal computers. Paul Allen had connections with a tiny Seattle-based software developer that produced a primitive operating system called QDOS (for “Quick and dirty Disk Operating System”). Allen bought the rights to QDOS and used it to build a more powerful operating system called MS-DOS (Microsoft DOS). IBM adopted MS-DOS as its operating system, making it the industry standard. As John Naughton observed in the
Guardian
, Paul Allen’s coup gave Microsoft “a license to print money—which it has been doing ever since.”
¹⁶

Bill Gates never fully acknowledged Paul Allen’s contribution. Early on, Gates proposed that the ownership split between the two Microsoft founders should be 60 percent for Gates, 40 percent for Allen. Gates later chopped his partner’s share even further, to 64/36.
¹⁷

Highly successful business partnerships frequently follow the yin and yang pattern of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. One partner tends to be the extroverted, entrepreneurial salesman of the team, while the other tends to be the introverted, stable, innovative technician. We see this complementary relationship between the extroverted, visionary entrepreneur Walt Disney and his quiet, pragmatic financier brother, Roy Disney. In the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream empire, Ben Cohen was the extrovert, the deal maker, the outside salesman, while Jerry Greenfield was the introvert who was content to stay behind the scenes, testing recipes and manufacturing the product. At Hewlett-Packard, David Packard was the driven extrovert while William Hewlett was the easygoing, behind-the-scenes technical innovator.

When forming your business partnership, think yin and yang. Find a partner who complements you, merge your respective competencies and personality strengths—then go out and achieve great things together.

Microsoft launched its Windows operating system in November 1985. With its point-and-click graphical user interface (or GUI), Windows was designed to compete with the GUI-based operating system of Apple’s Macintosh computers. The Apple operating system was based on GUI-based capabilities of a programming language Steve Jobs had seen in operation at the Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto. When Jobs learned that Microsoft’s Windows would compete head-to-head with Apple’s Macintosh, Jobs hit the roof. Malcolm Gladwell explains:

This is a telling portrait of Bill Gates, the ultimate competitor. Facing an infuriated Steve Jobs, Gates is calm and imperturbable—like a chess master who moves his piece, smiles, and softly says, “Checkmate.” Gates doesn’t raise his voice; he doesn’t have to. He simply tells Jobs a little parable, and he has made his point. And he has won.

If there is one central pillar of Bill Gates’s personality, it is
competition
. Competitiveness is the key to Bill Gates’s competence as a leader. Embedded in the word
competence
is that equally important word
compete
. When you, as a leader, demonstrate this all-important fifth side of leadership, you assure your followers that you can make them competitive—and you can lead them to victory.

In the early 1980s, Fred Thorlin was director of APX, the software marketing division of Atari. Back in Bill Gates’s Albuquerque days, Thorlin introduced the young software CEO to a two-player computer game. Thorlin and Gates played each other again and again. The result: Thorlin won thirty-five out of thirty-seven games. Thorlin came back through Albuquerque about a month later, and they played again. This time Gates won or tied every game. Thorlin concluded, “He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor.”
¹⁹

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced his plan to transition out of day-to-day involvement with Microsoft, while transitioning into the role of a full-time philanthropist. Gates and his wife established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a $36 billion endowment. There are many causes that interest him, from global poverty to climate change to the threat of terrorism. But closest to his heart are problems of malnutrition, infectious diseases, and inadequate health care in poor countries. Gates told
Rolling Stone:

Much of Gates’s concern about health inequity can be traced to a visit he made in the 1990s to the South African township of Soweto. There he visited a hospital ward filled with patients dying from tuberculosis. “This was hell with a waiting list,” he later recalled. “But seeing this hell didn’t reduce my optimism, it channeled it.”
²¹
He also channels his optimism toward the elimination of AIDS, malaria, and polio.

When asked why he devotes so many resources to these diseases instead of seeking a cure for cancer, Gates replies, “The world is putting massive amounts into cancer, so my wealth would have had a meaningless impact on that.” He believes that the foundation gives him leverage to negotiate lower prices on medicines and vaccines, so that the benefits of these medicines can be spread to more people in poor countries, especially children. “We are super-smart about what we pay. We get price reductions. We can track how many kids get the vaccines.”
²²

Bill Gates has also challenged the treatment of women as second-class citizens in some countries. Invited to speak in Saudi Arabia, he was shocked to face an audience segregated by gender. On the left, about four-fifths of the audience consisted of men. On the right, about one-fifth of the audience consisted of women, all cloaked and veiled in black. A partition separated them.

After his talk, Gates took questions from the audience. One man said Saudi Arabia hoped to become one of the top ten technology countries in the world. Gates replied, “If you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top ten.”
²³

The women’s side of the room erupted in cheers. The men’s side remained silent.

It takes time to change the world. But Bill Gates is very competitive that way.

Here are some lessons about the Fifth Side of Leadership that emerge from the life of Bill Gates:

1.
Competent people are competitors
. Competence is more than knowledge, more than skill, more than experience. Competence entails competitive drive. Some people seem to be born with a naturally competitive personality—but competitiveness can also be learned. Competition is a natural urge and a positive force if it is not carried to a cutthroat extreme. As complete seven-sided leaders, we don’t want to win at any cost, but we absolutely want to win.

Teams and organizations mold themselves to the character of the leader. So leaders need to be competitors if they want their organizations to compete. By being a role model of a competitive mind-set, we enable our followers to achieve a higher level of excellence. Raising the bar of excellence benefits everyone—those who win the competition, certainly, but even the also-rans benefit. And the public benefits from better quality products and services. As Bill Gates once said of Steve Jobs, “We spurred each other on, even as competitors.”
²⁴
That’s a competitive, competent attitude.

2.
Encourage the next generation to acquire the skills for tomorrow, not yesterday
. Our world has been impacted by the foresight and generosity of the Lakeside Mothers Club back in 1968. If they had not introduced two teenagers named Bill Gates and Paul Allen to the world of computers, the world might be very different today.

What’s the next big wave in science, medicine, technology, economics, philosophy, or the arts? You may be in a position to influence the next Bill Gates of medicine (cure for cancer!), the next Bill Gates of statesmanship (peace in the Middle East!), or the next Bill Gates of science (colonies on Mars!). Few people have ever heard of the Lakeside Mothers Club, yet they helped change the world. What can
you
do to encourage the next generation of world changers?

3.
Leverage the power of competent, complementary partnerships
. Neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen could have founded Microsoft alone. They needed each other. They completed each other; each supplied what the other lacked. Separately, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were brilliant individuals. As a team, they conquered the world. Every Bill Gates needs a Paul Allen, at least in those early entrepreneurial days. Do you have a leadership partner who supplies what you lack?

4.
Always seek wider, nobler worlds to conquer
. After Bill Gates conquered the software universe, he decided to devote himself to a bigger challenge: alleviating human suffering and tragedy in poor nations. His Silicon Valley nemesis, Steve Jobs, in a weird inversion of logic, disparaged Bill Gates for transitioning out of the software world and into the world of philanthropy. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology…. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
²⁵

Malcolm Gladwell points out that the fact that Bill Gates is now more interested in eradicating poverty and disease than in “overseeing the next iteration of Word” is not evidence of being “unimaginative.” It’s evidence of a scope of vision and imagination that goes beyond the product-focused, tech-obsessed vision of the late Steve Jobs, as brilliant as he was. Jobs, said Gladwell, endlessly refined “the same territory he had claimed as a young man.”
²⁶
Bill Gates sought new worlds to conquer. And so should we.

D
WIGHT
D. E
ISENHOWER

Competent to Decide

The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men
.

D
WIGHT
D. E
ISENHOWER

Y
oung Dwight Eisenhower and his older brother Edgar got into a fight in the kitchen while their mother, Ida, was baking. Soon Edgar had Dwight down on the kitchen floor, pounding and punching the younger boy. Their mother continued working at the stove.

“Give up?” shouted Edgar, sitting astride Dwight.