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Professionals

Bill Gates: The People’s Plutocrat

Bill-Gates

Bill Gates has frugal tastes. Asked to name his luxuries, he lists DVDs, books and takeaway burgers. It is hard, however, to think that any fast-food outlet would get rich on Gates’s custom. During a long list of engagements beginning well before dawn, he consumes nothing but cans of diet cola.

For America’s wealthiest citizen, austerity is relative. The retinue of staff and the private jet hint at a fortune said to be approaching £40 billion. As he told pupils at a south London school he visited this week: “If I hadn’t given my money away, I’d have had more than anyone else on the planet. Ninety-nine per cent of it will go.”

In an era when the wealthiest are society’s pariahs, the Microsoft founder has become the people’s plutocrat. Although some diseases, such as malaria, remain rife, his charitable foundation and his lobbying have borne results. In the past year, not a single citizen in India contracted polio.

“People think aid is abstract and thousands of miles away. I go there and see it. I’m intent on making sure that my money gets to people who need it, and I come back and say it’s working.” This message has been heeded by “Cameron and George,” who have promised to hit the recognised goal of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid.

Is he not disappointed that Mr Osborne will effectively be cutting the budget by more than £1.1 billion over three years, because the economy is shrinking? “I have nothing but praise for the UK. [The drop] is certainly unfortunate, but I can hardly complain about it. 0.7 per cent is the gold standard, and most countries aren’t living up to that.”

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Professionals

10 Ways To Step Up Your Leadership Today

10 ways to step up your leadership today

Strong leadership is a lifelong pursuit that requires continuous evaluation and improvement.  Every leader has his own style, and every company needs a personalized approach.

That said, there are 10 things any entrepreneur in any organization can do to deliver results:

1. Don’t try to get stuff done. 

That’s not your job.  As CEO, your job is to get others to execute for you.  A leader is the only one who can drive the big strategy, so being caught in the weeds will only undermine the ability for everyone else to win.

2. Forget about democracy.

You want to be a supportive, open-minded autocrat.  If you make soft suggestions and ask for input, you create a lack of confidence among your subordinates.  Be assertive; lead by unwavering decisiveness.

3. Never say ‘start small.’ 

Seek out the big ideas and drive your team to achieve them.  If you start small, you succeed small.

4. Make time your enemy.

The best CEOs move faster, get to scale sooner, and make things happen now.  Impatience is a critical tool to motivate results.

5. Tell exciting stories.

Having a vision and strong direction is only as good as how well you convince others to believe in what you’re saying.  Not much is as important as being able to relay–in person, or on paper–through stories that inspire others.

6. Deliver finished materials.

Any document that feels raw and rushed was not thought through carefully, and won’t be taken seriously. Pay close attention to typos, punctuation, page breaks, headers, and footers. Perfect formatting and proofreading are essential elements to sell your ideas.

7. Prepare extensively for every meeting.

The more structure you can create as CEO, the more your team will know how to deliver results.  You want to write crafted agendas, and make employees accountable.  Provide clear roles and clarify expectations in advance, and oversee meetings by deliberately pacing each section.

8. Remove staffers who don’t crush it. Immediately.

The only route to success is getting great people to achieve greatness.  The clichés are true: few get better at hiring; many get better at firing.  Being one man down is better than having an underperformer.

9. Don’t turn “off”–ever. 

If you’re going to inspire a team, you must avoid blackout periods, and communicate more often and more clearly than anyone else.  Silence results in complacency, so always respond.  Weekends and nights are just as important.

10. Behave like your company is publicly-traded.

What would you do if you knew that every decision you made would be visible to shareholders, affect share price, and put your job on the line?  Operate from this perspective and your biggest ideas will rise to the forefront.

Professionals

5 Ways to Make Your Team More Brilliant

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Every leader wants employees with great ideas. But great ideas don’t just appear in a vacuum. They tend to come most readily in environments where people feel intellectually stimulated, where deep thinking is valued and, most importantly, where people are given the time to think. Here are five ways you can nurture that environment in your company and among the people who report to you.

[tabs type=”vertical”][tabs_head][tab_title]Choose a video of the day[/tab_title][tab_title] Start a book club[/tab_title][tab_title]Schedule in creative team building[/tab_title][tab_title]Curate content[/tab_title][tab_title]Take a MOOC together[/tab_title][/tabs_head][tab]When Sal Khan started posting his videos years ago at KhanAcademy.org, he only covered math topics. But now Khan Academy features everything from physics to economics to art history. Send around a selection of a favorite video each day and bring up what you learned in conversations. Even writing a fact from a video on the white board before meeting starts will send the message that it’s OK to spend time stretching your brain. [/tab][tab]You can access classic works of literature in bite-size chunks via DailyLit (which emails a passage every day from books like The Odyssey or Moby Dick). Host once-a-month lunchtime discussions until you make your way through. Or you can buy a more current book for everyone and have the author call in during a lunchtime discussion. You may be surprised how many authors are willing to do this! [/tab][tab]Yes, you’re busy. Yes, everyone has a lot of work to do. But the work will still be there if you have an art teacher come in with paints and canvases for a 90-minute workshop. It will still be there if you all go do a session at a local pottery studio or learn how to make fabulous pastries at a commercial kitchen that does classes. When people get away from their inboxes for a while, they get a ton of ideas, and doing team building during the workday scores points from people who feel like they don’t see their families enough anyway.[/tab][tab]This takes some effort, as people get a lot of emails and tend to delete most newsletters they receive. But if your links to articles and reports are relevant and interesting (be sure to put the highlights in the email and interrupt an intriguing sentence with a “…” to get people to click), you can get your team in the habit of reading them. This is especially true if you devote 5 minutes at the start of any staff meetings or calls to discussing them.[/tab][tab]Massive open online courses (MOOCs) let people around the world hear from top professors and work through assignments, just like you would at that university. Coursera.org, for instance, features free courses taught by professors from Princeton, the University of Michigan, Duke University and other places, and covers topics from robotics to world history. MOOCs tend to have a high dropout rate, but if you take a course as a team, you’ll be accountable to each other.[/tab][/tabs]