Bill Gates - Founder of Microsoft

 President Bok, former President Rudenstine,incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, membersof the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates: I’ve been waiting more than 30 years tosay this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … andit will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates today for taking amuch more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimsonhas called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of myown special class … I did the best of everyone who failed. But I also want to be recognized as the guywho got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at yourgraduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewerof you might be here today. Harvard was just a phenomenal experience forme. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’teven signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dormroom late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about gettingup in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of theanti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validatingour rejection of all those social people. Bill Gates addresses the Harvard Alumni Associationin Tecentenary Theater at Harvard University’s 2007 Commencement Afternoon Exercises. Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most ofthe guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds,if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson thatimproving your odds doesn’t guarantee success. One of my biggest memories of Harvard camein January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun makingthe world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was justa student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready,come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the softwareyet. From that moment, I worked day and night onthis little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginningof a remarkable journey with Microsoft. What I remember above all about Harvard wasbeing in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimeseven discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and thoughI left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and theideas I worked on. But taking a serious look back … I do haveone big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of theawful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunitythat condemn millions of people to lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about newideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances beingmade in the sciences. But humanity’s greatest advances are notin its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education,quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest humanachievement. I left campus knowing little about the millionsof young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of peopleliving in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. It took me decades to find out. You graduates came to Harvard at a differenttime. You know more about the world’s inequitiesthan the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had achance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finallytake on these inequities, and we can solve them. Imagine, just for the sake of discussion,that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – andyou wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it? For Melinda and for me, the challenge is thesame: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have. During our discussions on this question, Melindaand I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poorcountries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B,yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus,was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States. We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of childrenwere dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliverthe medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventionsthat could save lives that just weren’t being delivered. If you believe that every life has equal value,it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priorityof our giving.” So we began our work in the same way anyonehere would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let thesechildren die?” The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the livesof these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothersand their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system. But you and I have both. We can make market forces work better forthe poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reachof market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, servingpeople who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the worldto spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay thetaxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needsof the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, wewill have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challengewill change the world. I am optimistic that we can do this, but Italk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us sincethe beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree. I believe we have more caring than we knowwhat to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time oranother, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – notbecause we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would haveacted. The barrier to change is not too little caring;it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to seea problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps. Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hournews, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediatelycall a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine thecause, and prevent similar crashes in the future. But if the officials were brutally honest,they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes,one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possibleto solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.” The bigger problem is not the plane crash,but the millions of preventable deaths. We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millionsof people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’seasier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it,it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situationis so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away. If we can really see a problem, which is thefirst step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution. Finding solutions is essential if we wantto make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytimean organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – andwe can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a pathof action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter. Cutting through complexity to find a solutionruns through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach,discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest applicationof the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug,or something simpler, like a bednet. The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine thatgives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundationsfund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more thana decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the bestprevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior. Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycleagain. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinkingand working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century– which is to surrender to complexity and quit. The final step – after seeing the problemand finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successesand failures so that others learn from your efforts. You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a programis vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in thenumber of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve theprogram, but also to help draw more investment from business and government. But if you want to inspire people to participate,you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – sopeople can feel what saving a life means to the families affected. I remember going to Davos some years backand sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’slife – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’veever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it. What made that experience especially strikingwas that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some pieceof software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software– but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives? You can’t get people excited unless youcan help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question. Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, butthe new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make themost of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past. The defining and ongoing innovations of thisage – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had beforeto end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease. Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to thiscommencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is thatthe problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to thepublic by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reacha clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distanceto grasp at all the real significance of the situation.” Thirty years after Marshall made his address,as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller,more open, more visible, less distant. The emergence of low-cost personal computersgave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating. The magical thing about this network is notjust that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the numberof brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales upthe rate of innovation to a staggering degree. At the same time, for every person in theworld who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left outof this discussion — smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’thave the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world. We need as many people as possible to haveaccess to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what humanbeings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for nationalgovernments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individualsto see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address thehunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago. Members of the Harvard Family: Here in theYard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. What for? There is no question that the faculty, thealumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improvethe lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improvingthe lives of people who will never even hear its name? Let me make a request of the deans and theprofessors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, awardtenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves: Should our best minds be dedicated to solvingour biggest problems? Should Harvard encourage its faculty to takeon the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depthof global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …thegirls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure? Should the world’s most privileged peoplelearn about the lives of the world’s least privileged? These are not rhetorical questions – youwill answer with your policies. My mother, who was filled with pride the dayI was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted abridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at thetime, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of theletter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” When you consider what those of us here inthis Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limitto what the world has a right to expect from us. In line with the promise of this age, I wantto exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deepinequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, thatwould be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make animpact. For a few hours every week, you can use thegrowing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see thebarriers, and find ways to cut through them. Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences ofyour lives. You graduates are coming of age in an amazingtime. As you leave Harvard, you have technologythat members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, whichwe did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also havean informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives youcould change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must startsooner, and carry on longer. Knowing what you know, how could you not? And I hope you will come back here to Harvard30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on yourprofessional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’sdeepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in commonwith you but their humanity. Good luck.