College Drop-out’s Advice for Success
The story now widely known, that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard as an undergraduate to focus on starting his own business due to his curiosity about finding a better way to program computers.
His viewpoint, recently placed at the BBC News site, makes for interesting reading, regardless of whatever you might think about the Microsoft Corporation.
Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed
“So if you look at how progress is made and where competitive advantage is created, there’s no doubt that the ability to use software tools effectively is critical to succeeding in today’s global knowledge economy.” - Bill Gates
This quote I find very appropriate in our Web 2.0 environment, an area which Microsoft struggles to penetrate, the collaborative and interactive space. Perhaps the throw-weight of his curiosity got dissipated and diluted within the giant MS corporation.
There are business organizations and which work to keep business units small enough to avoid such a dissipation of the “curiosity-energy”, the entrepreneurial spirit which, if you trace the organizational genealogy of a company you will arrive at the seed entrepreneur, the seed of curiosity and courage to take the risk to try new approaches.
2 comments December 16th, 2007
