Bill Gates Quotes
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The CEO's role in raising a company's corporate IQ is to establish an atmosphere that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration.
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Even when I wrote Basic myself the day before I burned it into a computer I wasn't making design changes. I didn't have a testing team. I did all the testing myself. And there was no project methodology or schedule that, there was the notion of coming to a close means testing a lot at the end and making very few changes.
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Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.
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Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.
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On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
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An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.
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Vision without execution is daydreaming.
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People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.
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Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.
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Certain teams are more careful in what they write. They generate less bugs. You can know that but it still doesn't mean there might be there might not be one bug that would be bad to ship the product with.
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We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success.
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When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.
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Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.
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You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.
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The spread of online information isn't just good for charities. It's also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.
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Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
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The US in some ways has been the best. Who figured out shale gas? Although that wasn't a good thing for CO2 levels, it was very innovative. It's led to low-cost energy. Who figured out nuclear power? Largely the United States. Once you get past the steam engine, which is mostly British, then the US has been at the center of most of the energy things that have happened.
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...one of the most inventive forms of creative capitalism involves someone we all know very well. A few years ago, I was sitting in a bar here in Davos with Bono. Late at night, after a few drinks, he was on fire, talking about how we could get a percentage of each purchase from civic-minded companies to help change the world. He kept calling people, waking them up, and handing me the phone to show me the interest.
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The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.
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I'm invested in a lot of battery companies - and there's a lot that exists I'm not in.
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You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch.
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Every new change forces all the companies in an industry to adapt their strategies to that change.
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Creativity allows people to be effective.
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In fact, batteries haven't improved over the last 100 years as much as they would need to in order to make that happen. So I'm invested in a lot of battery companies - and there's a lot that exists I'm not in. They're all having a tough time achieving it.