" confrontational style of management helped Microsoft maintain its edge - its mental toughness," Wallace and Erickson note in their book. Still, the pioneering spirit and inspiring atmosphere at Microsoft attracted many intelligent and ambitious young people to the company. Some of it helped us be successful, but I'm sure some of it was over the top." "When I was at Microsoft, I was tough on people I worked with. "Growing up, if I thought my parents were being unfair, I could be pretty harsh with them," Gates acknowledged in the 2019 annual letter he published with his wife, Melinda. The billionaire has since learned that there are limits as to how hard managers should push their employees. That's a rare trait." An older, wiser Bill Gates "There aren't many people who have the drive, intensity and entrepreneurial qualities to be that successful who also have the ability to put their ego aside. "He can be extremely vocal and persuasive in arguing one side of an issue, and a day or two later he will say he was wrong," Wood told Wallace and Erickson. It was a quality that Steve Wood, one of Microsoft's first programmers, came to admire. Moreover, Gates wasn't afraid to change his mind if someone made a convincing argument. "The goal, the motivational force for a lot of programmers, was to get Bill to like their product." "You always knew what Bill thought about what you were doing," MacGregor continued. "A lot of people don't like their jobs because they don't get any feedback," Scott MacGregor, who Gates hired from Xerox, told Wallace and Erickson. In fact, Gates' employees expected to be challenged, and they expected to be able to challenge Gates. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared." #BILL BOSS AMAZON HOW TO#Gates knew better than any other entrepreneur how to inspire and motivate his staff to achieve a shared goal, while also giving them leeway to develop creatively.Īfter all, as Spolsky later learned from his colleagues: "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. Of course, these anecdotes about Gates' notorious temper only tell one side of the story. As the meeting progressed, the questions Gates directed at him "got harder and more detailed." "The lower the f***-count, the better," Spolsky recalls. In addition to several other managers, there was also a person "whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word." In a 2006 blog post, Spolsky writes about his first in-person product spec review with Gates. Former Microsoft employees described the office as a very confrontational environment, with Gates being "demanding" and the work "intense."Īnother anecdote comes from Joel Spolsky, founder of Stack Exchange and a former program manager assigned to Microsoft's Excel product line. #BILL BOSS AMAZON CODE#that began, 'This is the stupidest piece of code ever written,'" the book recalls. More than one "unlucky programmer received an email at 2:00 a.m. But decades ago, a much younger Gates earned a reputation as the office bully.Īccording to James Wallace and Jim Erickson, authors of the 1993 Gates biography "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire," Gates was notorious for sending "critical and sarcastic" emails - often referred to as "flame mail" - to his employees in the middle of the night. Take Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates: In addition to his groundbreaking innovations, the billionaire is best-known today as a kind, compassionate and soft-spoken philanthropist.
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