I worked closely with Bill Gates for 8 years as an executive at Microsoft. Here are the 3 lessons he taught me that I'll never forget.
From my very first meeting with Bill Gates it was clear he was someone you could learn from. That grilling in a tiny Microsoft conference room in the summer of 1992 was one I'll never forget.
He quickly figured out the developer responsible was Eric Christensen, a pure genius. Bill focused immediately on Eric and what followed resembled a Star Trek mind meld. Bill shot in rapid fire more and more detailed questions, until they were discussing the movement of single bits and the size of the Intel 80386 instruction cache.
It seems that Bill learned early on that pressing for details until failure resulted in two kinds of responses. There were the people who were strong enough to admit, in the face of the then-richest man on the planet, that"I don't know." And there were those who just started making things up. Guessing at answers. Pulling things out of thin air.
Too many times to count, I was in a project update with Bill and watched this skill at work. Teams would meet at least twice with him. Once for the project kickoff to ensure things were headed in a good direction, one that made sense and aligned with the rest of the company. Then they would meet shortly before release to confirm that the objectives were met, mostly just a Bill stamp of approval.
The whole room would be silent, and then realize how right he was. Agreement was widely reached, a path was charted, the meeting soon adjourned.
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