Bill Gates Lead Quotations

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Leaders are those who empower others.

All lives have equal value. And so you say, 'why do poor children die when other children don't? Why do some people have enough nutrition or reasonable toilets and other people don't?' So those basic needs that, through innovation, actually it's very affordable to bring them...to everyone.

Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn't try to make every decision.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down.

If I think something's a waste of time or inappropriate I don't wait to point it out. I say it right away. It's real time. So you might hear me say 'That's the dumbest idea I have ever heard' many times during a meeting.

It is a great pleasure for me to announce that Steve Ballmer -- my long-term partner in building Microsoft and a great business leader -- is being named CEO,

There's really only one that they've done a leadership thing in, which is in search, and search today is very poor compared to what it will be even a year or two years from now -- their search, our search, everybody's search. So there's so much room to do better, to have that work well with the other offerings.

With tech companies, whoever's the leader is always questioned, you know. They say, 'Is this the end of them?' And - there's more - more times people think that's the case than it really is the case.

Personally, I'd like to see more of our leaders take a technocratic approach to solving our biggest problems.

The leader needs to create an environment in which people can analyze the situation and develop a good response.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.

We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior.

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?

If we hope to maintain our economic and intellectual leadership in the U.S., we must renew this commitment. Unless there is reform, American competitiveness will suffer as other countries benefit from the international talent that U.S. employers cannot hire or retain.

Tasks that we thought in the past as impossible will now be rather simple, ... We are going to lead the way in XML advances.

It's OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don't want them to catch up because we're slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

He's truly been a leader in protecting the safety of children online and convincing government, law enforcement and the private sector that we all need to work together to tackle this important problem.

Steve will absolutely be the business leader, ... I decided I wanted to spend more time with our product groups and drive the breakthroughs. Think of Steve as the business leader and customer champion.

As a leader in the computing industry, Microsoft has a responsibility to help its customers address these concerns, so they no longer have to choose between security and usability. This is a long-term effort.

Melinda and I are thrilled to have someone with Dr. Yamada's breadth of experience leading the foundation's work on global health. He's organized the best talent around big challenges, knows what it takes to bring promising science from the lab to people in need, and understands how to engage new partners. We look forward to working with him to help close the gap in health between rich and poor countries.

The idea that you can find your friends, you can talk, you can see who's the best, you can have contests - it's redefining how gamers think of the machine, it's making it more social. As we spread this idea across all our products, that's where we'll take the leadership role.

This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive, ... We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us ? still, the opportunity to lead is very clear.