FORTUNATELY, THE FRENETIC PREPARATIONS FOR BILL’S VISIT PROVIDED immediate and much needed distractions.
The morning after my return from Nepal, after a night of fitful sleep, I arrived at the office early. The focus on Bill’s upcoming visit meant a day of dawn-to-dusk meetings.
I started the day with a check of e-mail. I was happy to see a full in-box. Our subsidiary was definitely in all-hands-on-deck mode. Michael and I were exerting pressure on the sales teams to line up a few big deals that we could close either before or during Bill’s visit. Johnson, our head of sales, had copied me on a mail he’d sent out to his team:
“Sensitive of urgency, salesman shall be a wolf. A wolf never waits the result.”
I rang Johnson on his cell to cheer him on. “You should not be shy about keeping the heat on your guys.” The subsidiary had missed its sales goals during the prior half year. Now that I was on board, I had no intention of showing Bill anything but rapidly improving results. I reminded Johnson that all we needed were two or three large deals. “Big companies are already using our software. They are just not paying for it. You should tell them that sooner or later, they are going be pushed by the government to legalize. This is our golden opportunity—nothing focuses people like a deadline. This is the only time Bill will be in China during the next year. Use that to our advantage. If it helps, we will carve some time out of Bill’s schedule so that any executive who signs with us can have a short chat and have his picture taken with Bill. Tell them we will have press at the event. Maybe their photo will be in the newspapers. That might help to close a few deals.”
It may seem a strange inducement: a photo op as part of a six-figure deal. Yet it was actually an attractive offer to many company executives. In China circa 1999, senior managers did not earn their positions by being great capitalists. Most of the big companies were government-owned, and Communist Party leaders would often be rotated through senior positions based more on their political connections than on business acumen. Few things could matter to a political figure as much as getting his photo with a famous person, whether it be Chinese president Jiang Zemin or Bill Gates, seen by millions in the newspaper. It was an odd quid pro quo to offer, but one that I felt confident would yield results.
A chiming noise interrupted. The Microsoft Outlook calendar warned that I was running late for a meeting with our public relations agency. Tomorrow was our press conference to announce Bill’s visit. We’d brief fifty journalists on the expected highlights and itinerary for his two days in China.
My main concern was to put Bill’s visit in a “Chinese context.” Michael and I were both very aware that Microsoft’s local subsidiary was not perceived as a good Chinese citizen. Issues of nationalism, patriotism, and pride all intersect in Chinese corporate culture, and we knew that our treatment by the government would be more positive if we were viewed as being “the Chinese part of a global company.”
Because of my experience in Australia and the Asia region, the team turned to me for my opinion. During my tenure as marketing director, Microsoft Australia had been voted by readers of BRW, the nation’s most influential business magazine, as the second “most respected Australian company.” Qantas had won, and the Foster’s brewing house had placed third. We were proud to have been considered as “true-blue” as these two Aussie legends. I was asked how Microsoft China could pull off the same coup.
I explained that I was really too new to China to have an informed opinion.
“Everything is so different here. I don’t yet speak the language. And I don’t understand your customs.”
“We’re not that different,” Alex, the marketing director, challenged.
“Yes, you are. There are parts of this memo that are somewhat incomprehensible to me, like the idea of closing the press conference with a song. What’s up with that? No offense, but we have enough PR trouble in China already without me torturing the press with my voice.”
“Do you not sing songs at press conferences in America? Or in Australia?”
To buy time until I could come up with the right answer, I stared at the memo. “To close the press conference, the Microsoft management ensemble sings a song—with accompaniment by the band [Band? Had I approved the budget for a band?]. The song should show the vigor and vitality of Microsoft employees.”
I tried to imagine Jack Welch and his cadre of senior GE executives crooning a tune to the assembled press—“We’re just wild about shareholder value, and our shareholders are wild about us.” Or Donald Trump singing, “Give my regards to Broadway, as I am planning to buy it soon.”
I suppressed my smile and changed the subject.
“We have to make sure that Bill is well briefed and is constantly citing examples of the great work Microsoft is doing in China. We are spending millions of dollars on programs like technology scholarships for promising students. We’re building a massive research office here. We’re developing new products that will launch in China and then propagate to the rest of the world. But nobody talks about these investments and initiatives. In every meeting with the government here, they tell us about how we need to do more to help China develop a technology industry. We’re not getting any credit for our efforts. Chinese companies are having a field day by saying it’s more patriotic to buy software from them rather than from a ‘foreign enemy.’ If there’s only one thing we do right, it has to be making sure that Bill is on message that Microsoft is a good corporate citizen.”
I volunteered to lead an ad hoc group that would write up Bill’s briefing notes and left the rest of the team to work on the closing song.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I FLEW TO THE SOUTHERN CITY OF SHENZHEN, racked with fear. Bill was scheduled to arrive the next day, and there was so much that could go wrong. Microsoft had taken a beating in the Chinese press for suing a local company for software piracy. Unfortunately for us, it was a company with good political connections. The Chinese have a word for this, guanxi—“connections that can be very useful.” This company had unleashed the forces of guanxi in a vicious counterattack. The pliant local media had been convinced to portray Microsoft as an “evil foreign company that is only here to exploit the Chinese.” We had some image adjustment to do.
In addition to being fearful, I was also fascinated by how it would all play out. The juxtaposition we were about to witness could not have been greater. Bill Gates, the world’s most successful living capitalist, was about to visit the most populous Communist stronghold.
On the plane, drinking a lukewarm cup of Chinese tea and munching on steamed pork buns, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine the wealth disparity between Bill and the average Chinese. Using the Microsoft stock price as a proxy, Bill’s net worth on that day was about $60 billion, give or take a mere billion. In contrast, the average annual GNP per Chinese citizen was $725. Bill’s wealth was thus the equivalent to the annual earnings of 83 million Chinese citizens.
By March of 1999, nobody really believed the old orthodoxy that the country was purely Communist. A saying popularized by past leader Deng Xiaoping was “To get rich is glorious.” As if to prove it, we had a backlog of requests for meetings with Bill so long that a month of his time could not have met the demand. The level of enthusiasm the Chinese had for the world’s greatest capitalist spoke volumes. In one generation, the Chinese had gone from viewing a person like Bill as a “running dog of capitalism” to elbowing each other out of the way to get their photo taken with him. Although I was nervous, there was also a happy realization that regardless of how things went, I would eyewitness an interesting bit of history.
Eager to get my mind off the visit for at least an hour, I dove into a book that had nothing to do with technology, Microsoft, or China. The Unfinished Presidency promised to tell the story of Jimmy Carter’s “journey beyond the White House.” I was immediately drawn into the story of Carter the humanitarian. His work building homes with Habitat for Humanity and monitoring elections around the world provided inspiration—and showed that people could turn the page and start a new chapter of their lives. This was even true for a man like Carter, who had previously held the most powerful office in the world.
The current chapter focused on efforts led by Carter in the early 1990s to eradicate the guinea worm. This microscopic parasite made life miserable for millions across wide swaths of Africa and Asia. It would enter the human body through contaminated drinking water. Once inside it grew up to three feet. Unlike a tick that burrows into the skin, the guinea worm would actually burrow outside. A farmer would be going about his or her day when suddenly a hole would open in his or her ankle or foot and out would pop a fattened worm. Even after the shock, the swelling, and the pain of slowly removing the worm by wrapping it around a stick, the affected patient would be left with a burning blister made worse by toxins secreted by the worm. With few treatment options available, it would quickly be covered in flies. Diseases like tetanus could result.
A small amount of money could prevent this problem. For pennies, people could be saved from misery. Inexpensive microfilters to provide safe drinking water were available. At a health conference, Carter asked a simple question: “If the guinea worm is so easy to eradicate, why is it not being done?” Told that it was mostly a matter of political will, he decided that he’d lend his own connections to the fight against this parasite.
In early discussions with others interested in the disease, officials began by talking to Carter about whether to focus on Ghana or Nigeria or Pakistan. Carter, thinking big, suggested that instead of eliminating the worm in just one country, they should aim for a worldwide eradication of this parasite. Together with William Foege, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control, Carter “convinced the World Health Organization to select guinea worm disease as the second disease to be eradicated from the earth—after smallpox.”*
I loved that Carter thought big. He also got results: the world’s poor benefited from a 97 percent decline in the reported cases of guinea worm disease, from 900,000 in 1989 to fewer than 30,000 by 1995.
I was so captivated by this success story that I had not noticed our approach to the airport. Our bumpy landing brought me back from remote Africa to southern China. It was time to leap back into work.
THOUSANDS OF DETAILS HAD TO BE IRONED OUT IN ADVANCE OF BILL’S arrival. We had planned every minute of his day, down to two three-minute bathroom breaks. This schedule had to be approved by his team in Redmond, Washington, two weeks in advance of his visit. Our team in China had walked every inch of the booked hotel, arguing whether the walk from the Grand Ballroom to the restaurant where lunch would be served would take two minutes or three. I broke the tie. “He’s high energy, impatient, and manically focused. Go with two.”
One part of Bill’s trip planning had to be the ultimate travel luxury. A staff person in Redmond sent a garment bag full of clothes that arrived in each city a few days before Bill. When Bill entered a hotel room, his clean and pressed clothes were already hanging in the closet, with a tie that perfectly matched the suit. Lucky duck.
Prior to this being standard practice, his sartorial splendor left much to be desired. He would sometimes start the day by donning the rumpled clothes from yesterday off the floor. The official Microsoft PR spin on this practice: he is so focused on solving bigger issues that he doesn’t pay attention to little things like how he dresses. I will leave the unofficial spin to the reader’s imagination.
Bill was in Hong Kong, speaking at a CEO conference. The plan was for him to spend the night there and make the drive to Shenzhen early in the morning. It’s about a ninety-minute drive from Hong Kong to Shenzhen if you are a mere mortal. However, if you’re the richest man in the world, then certain arrangements can be made to cut that time in half. In Bill’s case, this meant no need to dawdle at the Hertz counter as the clerk tried to sell him overpriced insurance. Instead, he walked out the front door of Hong Kong’s glorious waterfront Grand Hyatt to find a convoy of vehicles waiting for him. We’re talking major-league motorcade. Black limos, SUVs with smoked-glass windows, motorcycles, and police cars. Sirens blaring, lights flashing. CHiPS meets West Wing.
The motorcade was courtesy of the Chinese government, which had also reserved the border crossing between Hong Kong and the mainland for Bill’s exclusive benefit. A lane on the highway was also blocked for his private use. It was enough to make me wish I’d flown down to Hong Kong to join in the fun.
As Bill set the new Guinness Book record for cross-border commuting, we were nervously waiting at the cavernous government-owned hotel that would host the day’s events. The lobby was a sea of reporters, government functionaries, hotel management, assorted groupies, and Microsoft employees. An excited buzz went up among the 100-plus members of his welcoming committee as Bill’s limo sped up the heavily manicured driveway, right on time.
The limo door opens. A hush descends. Bill steps tentatively into the lobby. The crowd applauds. Bill looks perplexed. His face says, “All I have done is walk ten steps from the limo to the lobby. These people are clapping as though I just nailed a half gainer off the high-dive board.”
I had not seen Bill in person in over three years. The first thing I noticed was that the legend was right. His hair really was a mess. His haircut was definitely not befitting a billionaire. Go into Super-cuts, ask for their newest employee, tell her that you’re in a terrible hurry, that you will tip based on speed rather than on quality, and you get something like this as a result.
The second thing I noticed was that Bill did not look at all happy to be here. Panic set in—I was partially in charge of the next event, and I did not want an unenthused CEO onstage.
But there was no time for thinking about any of this, as we had to immediately usher him into the first event—the official launch of Microsoft Venus. We were using a rather loose interpretation of the term launch; this product was so mired in the “still-on-the-drawing-board” phase of its life cycle that it did not even have a real name. Venus was the code name, and in truth we were at least six months away from product availability.
Microsoft Venus was a device custom-designed for the mainland Chinese market. We were trying to exploit one of the world’s largest market gaps. In China, hundreds of millions of families had risen high enough up the economic ladder to own a television. Internet penetration into the home, meanwhile, was about a hundredth of that level. So rather than trying to sell Chinese families an alien device, a PC, for their home, we would instead convince them to attach the “Venus” box to their television. Venus would allow them to access the Internet. But, wait, there’s more—it would also play DVDs.
In other words, it was the kind of product that made total sense in theory and on paper. The reality of bringing the product to market was proving to be more difficult. What we’d be showing today was what I euphemistically described to a member of the press as a “working prototype.” It was the only working prototype in existence. In my mind, the official list of components boiled down to metal casing, two chips, duct tape, and a prayer.
Nevertheless, the hall was packed like a rock concert. This, after all, was the crazy Internet-bubble era, when pretty much any product announcement that could string together buzz words invoking the Internet, connectivity, and China would meet an enthused reaction and hoards of cash. We had over 1,500 people in a room that any fire marshal worth his salt would have capped at half that number. The noise was deafening. Chinese tech geeks were standing on chairs to get a better view. Flashes flashed and photographers climbed over each other and threw elbows to get close to Bill. Reporters yelled questions in competing bursts of Mandarin and Cantonese. China had clearly caught Venus fever.
After watching Bill bump into a few photographers as he struggled to make his way to the stage, I joined the “human wall” that stood between him and the thrusting, impatient paparazzi. He finally got to the podium, but could not quiet the crowd. I pictured him thrusting his fists in the air and yelling, “Hello, Cleveland, are you ready to rock?”
He burst my fantasy bubble by instead clearing his throat and telling the crowd that he was happy to be back in China. The crowd quieted and he talked about our team’s vision of delivering customized information to millions of Chinese via the Venus device. He explained why the product made economic sense for the manufacturers whom we were trying to convince to produce it, and for consumers whom we’d ultimately ask to buy it.
We moved on to the product prototype demonstration. To lend authenticity to the demo, I’d convinced the team to set up a “typical Chinese living room” on the stage. My goal was to have people see the Venus device in the context in which it would be used. Our set designers had, however, come up with a living room that was more W Hotel than “rural Chinese peasant,” and one had to wonder how much we were paying to get Scandinavian-designed sofas airlifted in. Nevertheless, it was amusing to watch Bill amble across the stage to join our two Chinese presenters in their “living room,” as though a khaki-clad Bill just happened to be strolling in their agrarian, rural neighborhood and had dropped by for a quick product demo.
The session went well, at least by the standards of the “low bar” I had set (e.g., the prototype does not blow up onstage and immolate the presenters). Within ten minutes, it was all over, and Bill was being ushered off to sign a few contracts that Johnson’s team had secured. I joined the Venus team onstage and we exchanged numerous high fives and hugs. The day had started off strong.
Alas, the sum total of Venus devices eventually sold was zero. The project was canceled, for undefined “technical reasons,” less than a year later. On its official launch day one would never have guessed how quickly a product could move from “the device of the future” to the scrap heap of history.
THE PART OF BILL’S VISIT THAT REQUIRED THE MAJORITY OF MY FOCUS was his scheduled television interview with Shui Junyi. Junyi (the Chinese put the last name first, first name last, so one addressed him as Junyi) was one of China’s most famous television journalists, and he would be recording the interview that day for airing the following week on China’s leading television network, China Central Television (CCTV). CCTV is the network in China, holding the market power of ABC, NBC, and CBS combined. If anyone in China has a television, there’s about a 99 percent chance he or she has access to CCTV. As Microsoft had lately experienced severely negative press in China, we made it a high priority to give Bill a chance to talk directly to the Chinese people. The stakes were high, as was my blood pressure as I contemplated introducing the world’s most successful capitalist to the world’s biggest Communist country via a one-on-one chat with a journalist none of us had met.
I felt in over my head. After a short time in the Middle Kingdom, what did I know about the Chinese media?
My immediate reaction was to call my friend Dave and propose that we blow off steam over a drink. At the bar, I flagged down our waitress, who looked no more than 16 years old, and ordered a Scotch on the rocks.
I told Dave, “This is such a huge opportunity for Microsoft. You know the old adage ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’? Well, we will be making a first impression on at least one hundred million viewers. Think about it—it’s like having forty percent of Americans watching an interview. All these people in China are going to have an indelible impression of Bill, and therefore Microsoft, burned into their brain, all based upon this twenty-minute interview. And having been in China for all of two months, I am in charge. I cannot screw this up.”
The next morning I decided that the logical first step was to meet with the journalist covering the story. Shui Junyi was famous and popular in China. The prior year he had filmed one-on-one interviews with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. My team described him to me as “the Peter Jennings of China.” This only increased my fear.
Over the phone, I suggested to Junyi that we meet for a coffee and get to know each other, then discuss how we would work together. We set a meeting for the following Saturday morning at Beijing’s Intercontinental Hotel.
My team and I arrived early and staked out a large table in the middle of the lobby. It was an unusually bright day for winter in Beijing, and the atrium’s massive garden and abundant sunlight made me feel as though we were in Bali rather than Beijing. Junyi and his team arrived right on time. He strode to our table confidently. Dressed in jeans, boots, and black leather jacket, he looked even younger than his 35 years. His face showed a complete absence of stress.
He smiled broadly as he introduced himself in perfect English. Our respective entourages were introduced. It seemed to be a common rule in Chinese business that one should bring three times as many people to each meeting as were necessary. Fully two-thirds of participants in most meetings never spoke nor seemed to take notes, and I often left having no idea why they had been included.
The 12 other meeting participants leaned inward to Junyi and me, indicating that we were to talk while they listened. In order to learn as much as possible, I immediately began asking questions of Junyi. “Junyi, it’s great to meet such a famous journalist who is known by hundreds of millions of Chinese viewers. We’re thrilled that you’re going to interview Bill. Can you tell me more about CCTV’s goals for the interview, and also your own?”
“I am a big fan of technology,” he responded. “And I think that Microsoft, with other companies of course, has brought technology to millions of people who can now use it to be more productive. I also want to help the Chinese people understand more about what makes someone like Bill a great businessman. We do not have many examples of homegrown entrepreneurs. Yet there are millions of young kids here in our country who say that they want to be the next Bill Gates. China will only advance if we become a technically literate nation, and one that encourages the formation of new businesses. I think that Bill can be an inspiration to my viewers.”
Hmm, maybe this wouldn’t be too difficult, I thought. I was used to the Chinese press vilifying Microsoft, and now here was a journalist who seemed to respect our leader. So I went with this feeling, breathed deeply, and took a risk:
“Mr. Shui, I share your perspective. I think that Microsoft does some great work and I am proud to have spent most of my career working there. But I see a lot of criticism of us in the Chinese media—we are often portrayed as being an imperialistic American company that has ‘invaded’ China. But in actuality ninety-nine percent of Microsoft China’s employees are Chinese natives, with obvious exceptions like me, of course. (This drew a laugh from Junyi.) Bill has publicly stated that one day China will be one of Microsoft’s three biggest markets, along with the U.S. and India. The company is investing tens of millions of dollars in a research lab here in Beijing. There are only three places on earth where we do pure research—Seattle, Oxford, and Beijing. I view this as the ultimate sign of respect for the intellectual prowess of China’s young computer scientists. I’d like for us to be able to tell that story—the ‘Chinese version of Microsoft’—to your viewers.”
Junyi agreed that this would be the right approach, and we began brainstorming on questions that would touch on these subjects. It was a productive hour, one characterized by candor and cooperation. We got along so well that we agreed to meet again in two weeks. Shui asked that we meet “one-on-one, no entourages, no note takers.”
Two weeks later we had dinner at the Louisiana restaurant at the Beijing Hilton. Over a bottle of cabernet, we continued to discuss “the Chinese version of Microsoft,” and Junyi was kind enough to tell me about the questions he planned to ask so that I could make sure Bill was prepared. We had a celebratory cognac, toasted the success of the interview, and parted into the chilly streets of Beijing with an excited promise to meet up again in Shenzhen.
RARELY HAD I FELT SO GOOD ABOUT MY PREPARATION FOR AN ASSIGNMENT. At 3 p.m., as I walked into Bill’s suite to prepare him for the interview, I thought of the adage that James Baker III, the former U.S. secretary of state, said had been drilled into him from a young age by his father: “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.”
My mood quickly turned from quiet confidence to outright panic. It became obvious during the first thirty seconds of talking to Bill that he had not done his prior preparation. He was asking basic questions, including the name of the reporter and the network. Knowing how busy Bill is, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and began to explain some of the key facts about Microsoft in China that I hoped we could get across during the interview. As I talked, he stared at the floor and rocked back and forth in his chair. Suddenly I felt insanely insecure—was he impatient? Bored? Few things can yank the carpet out from under one’s confidence as much as one’s boss not paying attention. I continued on, discussing some of the investments being made in China by Microsoft that I hoped he would discuss during the interview. Again, I got no reaction, and the worn gray carpet seemed to evoke more interest than my ideas for a successful interview. I cut myself off from the briefing and asked, “Are you ready for this—do you feel that you know the China-specific answers to Junyi’s questions?”
“Yes, let’s go” was his curt reply.
So we went.
I had gotten Junyi’s permission to remain in the room and positioned myself behind the cameraman to be out of Bill’s and Junyi’s sight lines. Which is a good thing, because my face would probably have given away my disappointment. Bill’s answers were not even close to those that we had suggested, and they had little to do with China. Junyi’s first question focused on our R&D spending: “Microsoft invests over two billion dollars per year in research and development. How much of that money is spent in China?”
Bill’s suggested answer (per the briefing notes): “Our investment in China is significant. As a matter of fact, this is one of only three markets in the world where we’ve opened a research laboratory. The other two are at Oxford in Great Britain, and in Seattle. We’re doing a lot of work to make it easier to enter Mandarin characters, both on a keyboard and via pen-based computing. Personally, as a guy who grew up writing code, I have a great deal of respect for the brilliant scientists educated at Chinese universities, and they are doing work that will affect how Chinese people use computers for the next several decades.”
Bill’s answer (paraphrased): “Well, I can’t give you an exact number, but it’s large. We invest heavily because we believe that research is really important to the future of computing.”
I was incredulous, and disappointed, and it only got worse as the interview went on. As each China-specific question was asked, Bill gave a generic answer.
Later in the interview, Junyi discussed how Chinese youth looked up to Bill: “In fact, on the way in here I met a five-year-old girl outside the hotel who was crying because she wanted to meet you. She said that you are her hero, but she could not get past security.” Bill missed a golden opportunity to show his human side to 100 million Chinese citizens. Rather than saying “That’s a shame, I’d love to say hello to her after the interview,” he instead acted as though the subject had not been raised. He said nothing, there was an awkward pause, and then Junyi went to the next question.
I was tempted to stop the interview, except that this would also have stopped my career. Instead I sat in my chair, quietly pondering why CEOs sometimes decide that they are too smart to listen to the rest of their team. After hours of preparation, and getting as close to a journalist as is ethically allowed, my advice had been ignored. I thought of Paul Theroux’s line written while on a cruise ship: “After a man has made a lot of money, he usually becomes a bad listener.”
As the interview wrapped up, I tuned out. In my thoughts, I gave Bill the benefit of the doubt—after all, he is traveling constantly, we do business in more than fifty countries, we’re growing by leaps and bounds, and he has a lot to keep up with. The interview had been important for me. For Bill, it might have been just another in a series of meetings and interviews that were all strung together as he frantically crisscrossed the globe.
Yet my mind remained fixed on the idea that for Microsoft, the company to which I still felt loyalty, it was a missed opportunity to win over a skeptical Chinese public.
I had thought it would be exciting to spend time with Bill. But my focus was on results, not on proximity to power. The experience confirmed that pulling the plug on my career was the best idea. As the company got bigger, there was less correlation between efforts and outcome.
I had put long hours into this interview, and that time could not be gained back. But I knew it was important not to focus on Bill’s performance. There was no way I could ever run a company this large, so I was in no position to be judgmental. What seemed more important was the signal this sent to me. If I could not make a big difference at Microsoft, then perhaps this gave me even more of a green light to bail out. I could launch my own start-up and focus my hyperkinetic energy on the growing slate of Nepal projects. Rather than being in Shenzhen, I could be in Kathmandu. The children of Nepal obviously needed me more than my employer did. It was time to jump out of the plane and run my own show.
BILL’S BATBOY
Despite the demotivation inherent in Bill’s China visit, I can’t help but respect him. Not only did he start a great company at a young age, but the work he and Melinda are doing through the Gates Foundation will positively influence the lives of millions.
I am well aware that even though it was risky to leave Microsoft to start my own charity, I had a nice “safety net” in place because of the company’s stock-options program. Many people use the word generous when talking about this compensation scheme, but I think of it as visionary. The way Bill and his management team set things up was quite clever, because they attached a quid pro quo to the options. To work for the company, one had to accept a rate of pay that was significantly below what one could make at other companies. For example, when I joined Microsoft in 1991, my base pay was $17,000 lower than it had been in banking. In return, I was given 3,250 share options in the company.* The message this sent to employees was that if the company did well in the long term, they would also. But there were no guarantees, and only hard work and smart strategic thinking would increase the odds of this calculated risk paying off. Like much of history, it seems obvious in retrospect that this was a fantastic trade-off, but at the time none of us knew.
By 1999, those of us who had been at the company for a long time had done quite well. I give most of the credit to Bill and Steve Ballmer for their visionary leadership and their tenacious attention to detail. The two of them reminded me of a theory of Warren Buffett’s that I had read—whom you work for makes a big difference. Buffett recalled that a long time ago, baseball players like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig voted a full share of their World Series proceeds to their batboy.
“The key to life,” said Buffett, “is to figure out who to be the batboy for.”
Few people get to be batboy for the Yankees of the Ruth-Gehrig era, or the Microsoft of the Gates-Ballmer era. I am grateful for the serendipity.
Of greater importance to my long-term success were the management and leadership lessons I learned during nearly nine years at the company. These will be discussed in a later section of the book.
* The Unfinished Presidency, 1998.
* I still have the original letter, signed by Melinda Gates, and will one day auction it off as a charity fund-raiser.