Bill Gates Leadership Styles Analysis

Bill Gates Leadership Styles

Analysis of Bill Gates' Leadership Style

It has often been said a manager is what one does and a leader is who one is. After retiring from the CEO role of Microsoft, Bill Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to coordinate and manage their many philanthropic initiatives and programs. Bill and Melinda Gates are active leaders in each initiative and program, helping to set strategy, objectives and measures of success. Both travel extensively to personally be involved with an understand how their efforts are making a contribution in the lives of the less fortunate. Bill Gates learned while running Microsoft that the core values of any business has a major impact on its performance (Stack, Ozawa, Bishai, et. al., 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how Bill and Melinda Gates have architected the core values of their foundation to ensure the highest levels of effectiveness possible.

Analysis of Bill Gates' Core Values

The core values of Bill Gates that initially led to the success of Microsoft are what today anchors the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation together as it seeks to enrich millions of lives with better healthcare and medicine. These core values of optimism, collaboration, rigor, innovation, social justice and philanthropy are the guiding principles of the foundation and differentiate it from the many other philanthropic organizations in existence today. Bill Gates has a unique approach to creating a unified value-based framework for the foundation as well, seeking to run new initiatives and products as he ran new product development and introduction programs at Microsoft (Kenny, 2011).

The galvanizing focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the commitment to increasing the quality of education globally (Kenny, 2011). Each of the core values of Bill Gates continue to make the attainment of this mission highly efficient. Being with optimism, Bill Gates creates a culture of goal attainment in his foundation, making the possible attainable through a combination of innovation, rigor of analytical insight and strong reliance on collaboration (Kenny, 2011). Bill Gates has learned how to orchestrate an optimistic mindset of goal attainment along with strong rigor of analysis around educational options for underprivileged regions of the world, along with a continual focus on collaboration to build a world-class foundation. Bill Gates also relies on a very strong set of transformational skills to ensure that the focus on social justice stays constantly at the center of all activity in the foundation (Stack, Ozawa, Bishai, et. al., 2011).