What Business Can Learn from Gates' New Web Site

21.01.2010
Want as a corporate advisor? Care to hear and read his thinking on the big issues facing the world today? Want to apply his approach to your own business? Then his new site----has something for you.

Since at Microsoft in mid-2008, Gates has worked fulltime at his charitable foundation, which invests over $3-billion-a-year in solving the world's most critical problems, generally related to health and education.

The site, subtitled "An inside look at global matters," follows Gates around the world, both physically and intellectually. It includes essays, videos, and links to sources Gates is using to expand his own education. If there is such a thing as "progressive capitalism" it would describe the site's vague political bent.

The has shaken the philanthropic world because it is run not like some sleepy do-gooder but like Microsoft: Making big bets and expecting both wins and losses along the way. Gates puts the same sort of thinking and management style that helped Microsoft change the world into the foundation's work.

The foundation is managed by former Microsoft execs, including Gates, his wife Melinda, Patty Stonesifer, and Jeff Raikes. Warren Buffet is a top advisor and Gate's father, William H. Gates, Sr., is co-chair with the son and daughter-in-law.

I'll repeat my prediction, made nearly a decade ago, that someday Gates and/or the foundation will win a Nobel Prize for its humanitarian work, which has grown to include Warren Buffet's charitable foundation as well.