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Bill Gates

Bill Gates is one of the most important persons in the 21st century. He is widely known for being one of the most celebrated businesspersons alongside his apple counterpart Steve Jobs. He has managed to change the way we live today through the invention of the computer that has made life easier than before. Due to this significant contribution and significant business leadership, he has been known as a business magnate, inventor, philanthropist through his charity works and programmer. He is the former chairperson of Microsoft Inc., the largest computer software company in the world (Gates, 1999). He is a co-founder of Microsoft alongside Paul Allen (Gates, 1999). Being one of the wealthiest people in the United States and ranking among the top on the global platform, he has made a name for himself for his philanthropic contributions and made massive investments in the company that he founded. In this essay, we shall examine his life, the business leadership portrayed by Mr. Gates in the light of the success of his Microsoft Foundation.

Bill Gates was born in Seattle Washington and has an ancestry that composes of English, German as well as scots-Irish (Gates, and Read By-Steffens, 1998). The family where he was raised encouraged competition among the siblings and emphasized that there is always a reward for winning and a penalty for loosing. With this in mind, Gates have never learnt to give up on losing. He always has a way of fighting back and taking what is his. He enrolled to Lakeside school. Gates was interested in programming at the tender age. He took time in programming the GE and was excused from the maths class to pursue his interest. He was able to write his first program using the tic-tac-toe allowing users to play games against the computer. He settled back and realized that, there was something fascinating about the machine. He then developed specific interest on the computer and sought for more time on the computers. At the CCC’s office, Gates was able to study the source code for the programs that ran on the computer, and the company went of business in 1970. This is when it hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program, in return for computer time and royalties. After the school administration was made aware of the inherent abilities that Bill Gates had, they had him write the school computer program and since then he set off on expanding his programming skills. Graduating from Lakeside school in 1973, he enrolled at Harvard where he met Steve Ballmer his successor. With specified interest in the computer development, he did not have a definite study plan, and he later dropped out of Harvard to start his own company.

The leadership styles of many of the most effective entrepreneurs in the globe remains a key strategy to “getting things done” (Han, Kamber, and Pei, 2006). Bill Gates is one character that had a good eye for investments and as a computer genius, he did not waste a lot of time in college work. Rather, spending more time in his father’s garage, he was able to model the first computer models alongside his friend Paul Allen. He later developed the company to a multi-billion dollar company it is today. Mr. Gates has been referred to as a charismatic leader in many ways. In the business world, he is known to be a relentless person with enthusiasm to get his hands dirty for the sake of his business. Plainly speaking, Mr. Gates has been known to be reluctant in leaving his foundation and has played a very large role in the company since he handed it over to Steve Ballmer the Company CEO in 1998. He found it more valuable and worth spending more time in his foundation guiding on software development and selling the operating system software as it is the key to the revenues.

Mr. Gates is believed to be pushing his workers and the company toward his vision of a computer on every desk at home. In his vision, every one of those computers runs on Microsoft operating systems. Through his business accumenship, he has managed to pursue hardware manufacturers to use his operating systems in accompanying their hardware especially where PCs are involved. In the software industry, it is apparent that Microsoft is more of a monopoly and tends more towards ensuring that none of the software manufacturers edges it out in the area. We understand that Mr,#. Gates is described a vicious man, especially where he integrates Google in his own operating system as its primary search engine in an attempt to make his operating system the best in the market, making it a strategic move for the market. The development of Google chrome to beat the Mozilla Firefox and the Google mail to beat other mail providers saw him enter into an agreement with goggle to have their services preinstalled in the software packages and integrate with his OS well to beat rival camps (Domonkos, Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, 2008).

He is also known to be a strong, passionate person who has a passion for his computers from the time he made his first computing device. He is passionate for work as he led his team through the various tides to the multibillion empire it is today.. as opposed to other entrepreneurs who sometimes get crowded off by their business’s expansion, this was not the case for bill gates. He remained in control and held meetings with his workers to discuss progress, strategize on investments as well as lobby for a takeover when it was necessary.

He is known to have a more directive and participative leadership style that forms a basis of the company’s success. He specifies what he needs to be done, sets the goals as regard productivity and empowers his workers towards the goals. He takes his time with his workers and personally clarifies his goal to receive personal payoffs (Wallace, and Erickson, 1993). He emphasizes on activities among them the need to plan, control as well as organize activities for better results. In the event that the direction that he issues is not clear, he clarifies his ideas. He has an extraordinary ability to spread himself. This is in the reason that, despite technology being a complicated ordeal to deal with, he makes use of his managers to break down the different tasks into business units that compose of programmers and marketers (Wallace, and Erickson, 1993). He makes the group to compose limited personnel so that he can sit at a table with them and sell his ideas to them personally. He is quick in the identification of organizational weakness, management weaknesses and spots a talent in time to repair them.

In his meetings, he engages the group members in a discussion and listens to their suggestions. Their suggestions to him are of utmost importance, and he takes them seriously by coming up with a decision based on the idea. In the event that employees perform repetitive tasks, bill gates empower them by having their opinions heard and motivating them through participative decision-making. However, we note that, despite his ability to engage others, he has the sole mandate to make the decision making him stamp his control and send a message of who is in charge here. He loves joining the programmers in their daily brainstorming duties and develops new products; he notes that the brainstorming exercise is very important to him as it makes his team and himself see Microsoft as small company though it is now a multibillion-dollar investment.

Bill Gates has been known to be a leader who is efficient in the expression of clarity of thought as well as the execution of what he deems necessary for the company. He is skilful from this aspect and does not delay in taking action especially when it comes to implementation of policies. After the company grew, it is important to note that he stayed the main domain his line of work where he was engaged in software design (Smil, 2013). He pursued the quest along his line, that is software in general and operating system when it comes to the particular, building on his strengths and emerging the best. He knows that sticking to his line of specialty is more than an assurance as venturing in an unknown field poses great risks for the business. However, this ideology has limited his business to software design and sale unlike other contemporaries who have ventured into other new fields. He is a character who has been actively able to pursue his goals regardless of the obstacles on the way with a high set degree of perseverance one can ever come by.

One of his key characters is the ability to think big. He can dream big and have the power to pursue a dream with single-minded determination. This has been able to set him apart from other entrepreneurs even in his own field. Unlike the idea that there is a need to stimulate growth through the spread of ideas, he keeps the ideas within his borders and embraces the notion that he can develop his ideas ad come out as a world winner. He also takes learning as a process that takes a lifetime (Smil, 2013). In this light, we understand that after dropping out of college, he has been a reader and strongly willed writer more than most of the scholars we even know of. He is a strong indication of the limits of formal education and has emphasized on the fact that formal education is a lifelong process that is necessary for all. It is apparent according to his ideology that, however, much we learn of formal education, which is not piecemeal to what it is all about. It often leads to knowledge that develops into wisdom.

Giving back to the society is part of his undertakings. This has been taking place over a long period especially with the formation of the Melinda Gates foundation (Aronson, 2009). He has been a key player in addressing worlds’ most pressing issues, such as cancer, malaria as well as HIV Aids. He understands that there is a need to feel good in doing well by helping save millions of life through treatment programmes, as well as free drugs. With the teaming up of Warren Buffet, a combination has been put in play and charity has been their objective (Aronson, 2009). It is also imperative that Mr. Gates has been consistent in his business goals and his goals, in philanthropy hence; he has been termed as a global citizen.

Despite the fact that Bill Gates has chosen to remain in the software industry, we understand that he has been able to diversify the company products into dominance. In the instance that his company has achieved dominance, for example, in the operating system design, he has aggressively defended it making him an aggressive businessperson. As early as in 1981, he had begun building a reputation for distancing himself away from the others (Sherman, 2000). He has been noted as being notorious for not returning phone calls and being unreachable. He is also a competitor from the fact that he never gives up on anything. He excels where other fails and has a tendency to encourage the same for his employees. Once a manager in his team beat him 35 of 37 in a game, after they met the next month, he won and tied every game having studied it and mastered it.

Bill Gates has also been known to be an open-minded person (Lesinski, 2009). He is known to interrupt conversations with such ride utterances, as “that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”. Another common phrase with him is “why don’t you give up your options and join the Peace Corps?” with such utterances, the target has the task of convincing Mr. Gates to accept the ordeal. This is a hard place and in the end, if he is to be convinced, then the ideas has been examined from all dimensions (Lesinski, 2009). Bill Gates has been known to be a results driven leader with an extraordinary ability to focus on a certain goal set and deliver results. We realize that it is important for the leader of a multibillion-dollar investment founder to focus. For him, it is more than talent, as he can develop his thinking in line with his goals and align that of his workers to the needs of the business.

In conclusion, Bill Gates has been one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the global business and has been dominant in every aspect of our lives where computers are used. It is evident that his leadership skills are unmatched due to the extraordinary ability to manage the business like a small unit. More importantly, he has been known as an aggressive businessperson, who has strict goals and a good eye for investments. Building upon his talents, he has emerged a business premier in the software industry where he leads to date. For him, he believes in his ability to use his time in persuading his managers to achieve personal rewards in turn.

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