The Bill Gates Way

Bill Gates’ description of his work process in Fortune Magazine has caused some interest in the blogosphere.

Besides the fact that his description is somewhat of an infomercial for Microsoft applications, three items caught my attention. One was the way in which he recruits innovative ideas from within his company: 

Right now, I'm getting ready for Think Week. In May, I'll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I've been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company.

I'm now far more efficient in picking the right papers to read, and I can add electronic comments that everyone sees in real time.

I’m curious what has made Gates better at deciding which ideas to give his time to—is it a better process, better tools, or is his he better at scanning topics? I’m also curious to know more about Think Week. For a company its size and with a strong focus on new business and technology research, I guess that far more than 100 papers would be submitted if the submission process were open to everyone. There must be a weeding process in there somewhere, and I’d like to know what it is for my own enlightenment.

A second item that I noticed was Gates saying that he gets about 100 e-mails a day, and he says the reason that the number is this low is because his Outlook filter only lets through e-mails from Microsoft employees and people in his address book. Six years ago I used to get over 100 e-mails a day at a company that only had $200 million in revenue, so again I’m guessing that there’s more filtering going on than Gates suggests.

I’ll leave the third item that caught my attention to a separate post since I think it deserves its own space.

I’ll finish by saying that I’m a little disappointed that Gates didn’t use the opportunity to advance Microsoft’s use of blogs for internal communication. As far as I understand, Microsoft uses blogs extensively within their company while only a very small number of other companies use internal blogging as a form of communication. Rod Boothby has been provided compelling reasons for their adaption and it would have been nice to see the concept get some high-level validation.