Improvement Insights Blog
Think Like Bill Gates
Ever been tempted to give up on some problem? Think it might be impossible to solve? Consider learning to think like Bill Gates. Here’s how:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I recently watched a documentary about Bill Gates, and the interviewer was asking about… Bill was trying to eradicate polio on the planet, and he had gotten vaccination and kind of gotten it narrowed down to some part of northern Africa (if I remember correctly), but insurgents and rebels and all kinds of things were trying to stop this immunization (which I don’t understand at all, but that’s how it goes, right?). So one of the things the guy asked him, he said “Bill, are you going to call it quits [and] give up on this?” Bill looked at him quizzically, like, “What are you talking about?”
“I think this is a common thing among software people like me and like Bill and like all the other geeks in the world: if it’s not quite working right, we don’t say “It’ll never work.” What do we do? We start to look at the code and figure out how it’s working, and is there a way to tweak this and that and temper something and adjust something else to get the outcome we want? You know what? Sometimes we have to fiddle with it, we have to try different things; we iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate… and then, guess what? Out of the clear blue sky comes the answer, and you plug that in and it works perfectly.
“So if somebody says, “Are you going to give up on this idea to fix this, that or the other thing?” Just adapt a little Bill Gates or a little Jay Arthur, right? Look at that process as code: that’s not working, and how are we going to change the process so the code starts to work so that we get the outcome we want? Pretty simple, but it takes a tenacity most people do not have.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Be more tenacious. Hassle-free healthcare; hassle-free America. Let’s go out and improve something else this week.”
