Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates

It's a great day, in line with the Life lessons series, I will like to share a great post from around the web on lessons from Bill Gates.
Enjoy!


Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates
By: Nick Scheidies

Table of Contents

#1 Get Lucky
#2 Make the Most of the Luck You’re Given
#3 Bite Off More than You Can Chew
#4 Quality Control is Crucial
#5 Revolutionary Ideas are Shown, Not Told
#6 Persevere
#7 Share Your Vision with Your Team
#8 Marketing is Simple
#9 Don’t Learn From Success
#10 Learn from Unhappy Customers
Looking Forward

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1974.

In I975, he co-founded Microsoft – a computer software company that would eventually make Gates the world’s wealthiest man. He earned the money by masterfully guiding the world into the era of networked personal computers.

Today, Gates is no longer the world’s wealthiest, but he’s still worth a healthy US$ 59 billion.

He’s retired from his role as Microsoft’s CEO and instead devotes himself full-time to philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Below, you’ll find 10 business lessons from the life of Bill Gates.
#1 Get Lucky

Bill Gates Mug Shot

Gates is a very smart man, but he’s benefitted from more than his fair share of dumb luck.

In 1968, Gates was an eighth grader, attending a private middle school in Seattle called Lakeside. That year, the school invested $3,000 in a state-of-the-art computer.

13-year-old Bill joined computer club and was instantly hooked. He and a handful of other enthusiastic students racked up hours and hours on the machine, learning how to program through trial and error. It was the beginning of a journey that would propel Gates to astronomical success.

Here’s where the dumb luck comes in: in the 1960s, very few colleges had computer labs and a middle school with a computer was unheard of. The chances of a 13-year-old having access to a computer were pretty much one-in-a-million.

If Lakeside hadn’t purchased a computer, then young Bill might never have discovered his love for computer programming and he never would have started Microsoft.
#2 Make the Most of the Luck You’re Given

Bill may have been ridiculously lucky, but all the computer time in the world wouldn’t have meant anything if he hadn’t dedicated himself so fully to master it.

Ultimately, it was the thousands of hours of focused labor that made Gates into the type of computer genius who could start a successful software company.

We don’t always recognize it, but each of us is uniquely lucky. Whether through our natural talents, our circumstances, or our relationships with others, we’re all fortunate to have many paths to success in front of us.

Take in your luck for a moment – and then capitalize on it.
#3 Bite Off More than You Can Chew

Altair Microcomputer

Microsoft’s big break came from Bill Gates telling a fib.

Gates called up a computer company called MITS and told them that they had developed a BASIC interpreter for their microcomputer, the Altair 8800.In 1975, Gates and his childhood programming buddy, Paul Allen, were looking for a way to turn their shared computer hobby into a career.

MITS was interested in seeing a demonstration of the software. This presented a problem, since the software Bill had promised didn’t actually exist.

Gates and Allen developed it in a hurry, presented it to MITS, and made the sale. They officially founded Microsoft one month later, in April 1975.

“An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”

– Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries

By always pushing yourself to deliver a little bit more than you’ve proven yourself capable of, you’ll go further, faster in your business ventures.

That said, I don’t recommend that you follow Bill’s lead and actually lie to your potential clients.
#4 Quality Control is Crucial

Microsoft's First Logo

As Microsoft grew, it began hiring more and more programmers.

Gates had taken on the role of CEO and his job didn’t call for any programming. But that didn’t stop him from reviewing – and often rewriting – every single line of code that the company released.

Bill’s keen eye for detail ensured that Microsoft always shipped quality software. It also made sure that he never lost track of his team and that he was always intimately familiar with Microsoft’s products.

As your business grows, you’ll likely have to hire a team of employees. It may be tempting to just let them work and trust that they’re doing a good job. But your company has a reputation to protect, so take a page from Gates’ book and keep a close watch on your team’s output.
#5 Revolutionary Ideas are Shown, Not Told

Computer screens once displayed just text.

In the early 80’s, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer would travel around the country delivering seminars about how graphic interfaces were the operating systems of the future – but nobody believed them.

Computer companies told the Microsoft boys that graphic interfaces would be too slow and that it would be difficult to write the software for them. They were less than enthusiastic when Microsoft announced in 1983 that it was developing Windows.

Apple Macintosh (1984)

Attitudes changed quickly in 1984, when Apple launched the Macintosh. It became the first commercially successful computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

All of a sudden, it was obvious to everyone that the wave of the future involved windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device. Within a few years, the market was flooded with graphical OS software. Notable examples include Deskmate, Workbench, and – of course – Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft was able to release Windows 1.0 in 1985, just a year after the Mac’s success, because they had actually started developing the software two years earlier.

If you’ve got a revolutionary idea, don’t worry if other people don’t get it. Start developing it now so that you’ll be prepared when the time is right.
#6 Persevere

There is nothing that was overnight.

– Bill Gates

Microsoft Windows 3

income diary windows 3Windows 1.0 actually wasn’t much of a success.Windows 3

Microsoft released Windows 2.0 two years later, in 1987, but it didn’t fare much better. It found moderate success thanks to software – in particular, Excel, Word, and Aldus Pagemaker.

It wasn’t until 1990, when Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, that they found significant success with a graphical operating system. It was a big moneymaker for the company and it sold over 10 million units in just two years.

Microsoft had found the model that would transform them into a computer software giant.
#7 Share Your Vision with Your Team

Just as Gates has seen the advent of the graphical interface years in advance, he predicted the preeminence of the Internet long before the average Joe had a dial-up connection.

By May 1995, Gates was so convinced that the Internet was Microsoft’s future, that he felt compelled to write a very, very long memo to his company. It concluded:

“The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge. I am looking forward to your input on how we can improve our strategy to continue our track record of incredible success.”

Gates took the time to write this memo because he recognized how important it was for his whole team to be on board with Microsoft’s mission. The result: Windows 95 came bundled with Internet Explorer.
#8 Marketing is Simple

People don’t buy a product because it’s got a great logo or a low price. They buy because they’ve got a problem and they’re convinced that the product will solve it.

The most difficult part about marketing, then, isn’t coming up with the right tagline. It’s providing a great solution to an actual problem. If you can do that and then demonstrate it, then marketing your solution is simple.

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.

– Bill Gates

#9 Don’t Learn From Success

It seems obvious that we should reflect on our successes and learn from them. If we can recognize the factors that contributed to that initial success, we should be able to repeat them and repeat our success.

But Gates has argued that success can actually cloud our vision, causing us to become over-confident and unprepared for the new challenges that the future holds.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

– Bill Gates

We shouldn’t ignore the patterns of our initial success. But neither should we cling blindly to particular actions or strategies simply because they’ve worked in the past.
#10 Learn from Unhappy Customers

Over the years, Bill Gates has made a ton of his customers unhappy.

Anyone who has stared at the “blue screen of death” understands why.

But as much as people love to complain about Windows, they continue to use it. Windows has been the world’s primary operating system since 1990 and it boasts a stout 82.5% market share as of August 2011.

The reason is simple: Microsoft continues to respond to customer feedback and improve their products. The attitude starts with Bill Gates, himself:

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

– Bill Gates

Looking Forward

Bill Gates Looking Forward

Bill Gates career has been marked by his incredible vision. Microsoft beat out the competition largely because they were always looking one step ahead, to the next revolutionary idea.

The lesson here: if you want to get ahead in business, think ahead.

Gates was still thinking ahead when he retired from Microsoft in 2008. He told PC Mag that he thought the Tablet PCs, Internet TV, and natural user interface would be thriving in the near future. History is proving him right.

So, if Gates knew what was coming next, why didn’t he stick around to make it happen? Surely, he could have added a few billion more to his bank accounts.

The answer is that, at some point while thinking about the future, Gates started giving more importance to health care, poverty, and education than he did to the next hi-tech gizmo. He’s making a bigger impact on the future through The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation than he would have made by continuing to run Microsoft.

Images Courtesy of

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/

source: http://www.incomediary.com/top-10-business-lessons-from-bill-gates




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BILL GATES' BEST BUSINESS BOOK

I have been a regular visitor to the Gate's personal blog for a couple of weeks and I am always amazed by his Reading list, trips and continuous philantrophic feats around the world.
I am compelled to share his review of his favourite business book,a book with a captivating title. I also share a link to downloading a free chapter of the book. As a matter of fact Gates created an instant it for this book after he revealed to the world it's hi favourite!
The book is out of print but sure amazon is your answer ;)
Read on!

The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read
BY BILL GATES ON JULY 12, 2014

Not long after I first met Warren Buffett back in 1991, I asked him to recommend his favorite book about business. He didn’t miss a beat: “It’s Business Adventures, by John Brooks,” he said. “I’ll send you my copy.” I was intrigued: I had never heard of Business Adventures or John Brooks.

Today, more than two decades after Warren lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published—Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read. John Brooks is still my favorite business writer. (And Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy.)

A skeptic might wonder how this out-of-print collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s could have anything to say about business today. After all, in 1966, when Brooks profiled Xerox, the company’s top-of-the-line copier weighed 650 pounds, cost $27,500, required a full-time operator, and came with a fire extinguisher because of its tendency to overheat. A lot has changed since then.

It’s certainly true that many of the particulars of business have changed. But the fundamentals have not. Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then. In terms of its longevity, Business Adventures stands alongside Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the 1949 book that Warren says is the best book on investing that he has ever read.
Brooks grew up in New Jersey during the Depression, attended Princeton University (where he roomed with future Secretary of State George Shultz), and, after serving in World War II, turned to journalism with dreams of becoming a novelist. In addition to his magazine work, he published a handful of books, only some of which are still in print. He died in 1993.

As the journalist Michael Lewis wrote in his foreword to Brooks’s book The Go-Go Years, even when Brooks got things wrong, “at least he got them wrong in an interesting way.” Unlike a lot of today’s business writers, Brooks didn’t boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won’t find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters, and show how things went for them.

In one called “The Impacted Philosophers,” he uses a case of price-fixing at General Electric to explore miscommunication—sometimes intentional miscommunication—up and down the corporate ladder. It was, he writes, “a breakdown in intramural communication so drastic as to make the building of the Tower of Babel seem a triumph of organizational rapport.”
In “The Fate of the Edsel,” he refutes the popular explanations for why Ford’s flagship car was such a historic flop. It wasn’t because the car was overly poll-tested; it was because Ford’s executives only pretended to be acting on what the polls said. “Although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in.” It certainly didn’t help that the first Edsels “were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn’t open, and push buttons that…couldn’t be budged with a hammer.”
One of Brooks’s most instructive stories is “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox.” (The headline alone belongs in the Journalism Hall of Fame.) The example of Xerox is one that everyone in the tech industry should study. Starting in the early ’70s, the company funded a huge amount of R&D that wasn’t directly related to copiers, including research that led to Ethernet networks and the first graphical user interface (the look you know today as Windows or OS X).

But because Xerox executives didn’t think these ideas fit their core business, they chose not to turn them into marketable products. Others stepped in and went to market with products based on the research that Xerox had done. Both Apple and Microsoft, for example, drew on Xerox’s work on graphical user interfaces.

I know I’m not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox’s part. I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft. I pushed hard to make sure that we kept thinking big about the opportunities created by our research in areas like computer vision and speech recognition. Many other journalists have written about Xerox, but Brooks’s article tells an important part of the company’s early story. He shows how it was built on original, outside-the-box thinking, which makes it all the more surprising that as Xerox matured, it would miss out on unconventional ideas developed by its own researchers.

Brooks was also a masterful storyteller. He could craft a page-turner like “The Last Great Corner,” about the man who founded the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain and his attempt to foil investors intent on shorting his company’s stock. I couldn’t wait to see how things turned out for him. (Here’s a spoiler: Not well.) Other times you can almost hear Brooks chuckling as he tells some absurd story. There’s a passage in “The Fate of the Edsel” in which a PR man for Ford organizes a fashion show for the wives of newspaper reporters. The host of the fashion show turns out to be a female impersonator, which might seem edgy today but would have been scandalous for a major American corporation in 1957. Brooks notes that the reporters’ wives “were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories.”

Brooks’s work is a great reminder that the rules for running a strong business and creating value haven’t changed. For one thing, there’s an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect product, production plan, and marketing pitch; you’ll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans.
That is a lesson you learn quickly in business, and I’ve been reminded of it at every step of my career, first at Microsoft and now at the foundation. Which people are you going to back? Do their roles fit their abilities? Do they have both the IQ and EQ to succeed? Warren is famous for this approach at Berkshire Hathaway, where he buys great businesses run by wonderful managers and then gets out of the way.
Business Adventures is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of leaders in challenging circumstances as it is about the particulars of one business or another. In that sense, it is still relevant not despite its age but because of it. John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.


Source: Bill's Personal blog at www.gatesnotes.com


Download a chapter of the book from Gates' blog here

Read to Lead!


Emmanuel Ayeni
EMMANDUS Networks Nigeria
www.emmanuelayeni.com
Twitter: @emmandus
Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/emmandus




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