Business and Leadership- Bill Gates (Essay Sample)

Business and Leadership- Bill Gates Student’s Name: Institution’s Name: Business and Leadership- Bill Gates Bill Gates is widely recognized as the one of the most entrepreneurial business leaders the world has ever produced. Born in 1955 in Seattle, Washington, Bill Gates originates from a high spirited and entrepreneurial family (Aronson, 2009). This paper explores the life and leadership of Bill Gates in the context of an outstanding business leader. It highlights important qualities of a leader that are demonstrated by a visionary leader including risk taking, curiosity, perseverance, passionate, open-mindedness and resourcefulness. In his early life, he demonstrated passion in software and consequently began computer programming at a tender age of 13 years. According to http://inventors.about.com, he joined Harvard University to pursue Law like his father between 1973 and 1975. Although his intentions were to pursue law, his passion was in programming and computing thus he left after two years in order to start Microsoft. While at Harvard University, he came across Steve Ballmer who later became the chief executive officer at Microsoft between year 2000 and 2014. As teenagers, Paul Allen and Bill Gates collaboratively operated a small firm known as Traf-O-Data that designed a system that was capable of monitoring and counting Seattle city traffic. Bill Gates is the founder and the author of BASIC programming language for microcomputers (Gates & Lowe, 1998). The two later formed Microsoft and began developing software for personal computers even before Bill gates had graduated. Microsoft became the most popular technology company after developing computer operating systems. The company won mega business deals such as acquiring the licensing rights for MS-DOS that it first sold to IBM. In 1983, Microsoft formally launched Microsoft windows which is a graphical operating system. Microsoft dominated the computer market gaining over 80% of the world’s entire market for software. The company overtook Mac OS that had been formed in 1984 dealing in personal computers. Bill Gates marries Melinda French Gates and later the couple got three kids. To give back to the society, Bill Gates family formed Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that supports other philanthropic foundations across the world in education and health sector. Bill gates possesses outstanding qualities and strengths that I admire up to this date. To begin with, his curiosity is one of its kind. His various fascinating advances in the line of computer programming truly demonstrates his enthusiasm and curiosity. According to , he takes his time in studying those advances as well as integrating them together in a magical way by combining hardware and software. Furthermore, Bill Gates has an excellent vision (Gates & Lowe, 1998). He believed that every household and business will own a computer running Microsoft software. In response to his vision to the world, he aligned Microsoft’s resources with the vision. When nobody else across the world was aware of the future of software industry, Bill Gates remained true to his passion by pursuing his vision to the end. This vision has since won him numerous honor and success as he holds the world’s richest title for over fifteen years now. Empirically, Bill Gates was featured as the world’s richest business man in 2016 holding a net worth of $75 billion. Ironically, Bill Gates still holds the title despite his wealth dropping by $4.2 billion from his wealth in 2015 (Aronson, 2009). The success of Microsoft Corporation is largely attributed to Bill Gate’s outstanding leadership style. He recruited and retained the best talented software engineers who are familiar with computer programming and who possess the capacity to quickly gain new knowledge. In addition Bill Gates does not fear to fail. He tries numerous tactics and pursues that which works in Microsoft. He tells of the significant amount of money and time lost in failed projects including a joint OS with IBM and the omega database. Bill Gates believes in putting in place controls and has obsession of paying attention to finer details. For instance, he regularly meets program managers and Microsoft’s senior executives to get firsthand information and updates on various ongoing projects. Further, Bill ...