Tag Archive 'Harness the Intellect of Every Employee'

  • Develop Your Corporate Memory

  • Another key is ensuring that a company retains, and can quickly retrieve, the information that it accumulates. Gates calls this "corporate memory." And it isn’t only employees who need access to vital information; customers, too, should have access to this information. This way, account managers and customers can refer to the same document when discussing [...]

  • Empower Workers with Information They Can Act On

  • Gates leads by example, inviting anyone in the organization to send him an email at any time. And he doesn’t want just the good news—he wants bad news even faster (another Gates principle is, "Bad news must travel fast"). In today’s fast-changing business environment, anyone, anywhere, can get a paradigm-busting idea, and organizations that do [...]

  • Foster a Culture in Which Ideas Rule

  • While Microsoft clearly was not oblivious to the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, it did not put the Internet high on its priority list. (Gates recalls that he ranked the Internet as number five or six on his priority list back then.) What is most compelling about Microsoft’s shift to an Internet strategy is [...]

  • The Rise of the Internet and the End of Microsoft?

  • The story of how Microsoft reacted to the Internet phenomenon illustrates the way Gates empowers workers by encouraging communication at every level of the hierarchy—and thereby derives great benefit. Had Gates taken a different tack, Microsoft might have become a very different company. The story begins in the mid-1990s. While some companies were gearing up [...]

  • Rethink the Way Information Moves Inside the Company

  • Gates has been one of the main drivers of the technology revolution. Nevertheless, he has made some fundamental miscalculations about that revolution. For example, at first Gates was not a believer in the Internet, although he later came to view it as a powerful tool that would transform the very nature of work and commerce. [...]

  • What Would Bill Gates Do?

  • Smart people anywhere in the company should have the power to drive an initiative. —BILL GATES, Chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft The Internet is not just about new start-up companies …. The Internet is much more about existing businesses and how they take skills and customer base and move over to use these digital [...]