Bill Gates
Bill Gates: Leader and Role Model
William Cook
COLL/148
August 14, 2011
Barbara Goldberg
Bill Gates is an effective leader and leadership role model and he is my choice for a role a model. Bill Gates has demonstrated and employed good leadership skills to be a successful business man. He has also demonstrated why he is a good role model for those who want to become leaders themselves. I believe that I share many of the leadership traits with Bill Gates and that those traits will help me in my plan for success. The reasons I chose Bill Gates as my leadership role model are as follows: he is one of the founders of Microsoft and has shown good leadership with the decisions he has made running the company and is also in the same field as my career of study which is programming. Bill Gates has many qualities of a leader, but most notably is the fact that he drove his employees hard and himself harder (Boyd, 1995). Throughout the years Bill Gates has shown his leadership capabilities through his dedication and hard work by the ever growing success of Microsoft. Another example of his leadership ability was when he released Windows 3.0 and won the battle for the first GUI operating system, he did this by keeping his hand involved in all the major, potential competitors to his pet project while also continuing development of his own product (Boyd, 1995). A few of the characteristics of an effective leader are knowing the industry in which you plan to work, building your team so that you have sufficient help to accomplish what you set out to do, and most importantly develop a vision and solid goal so the people that work for you know what they are working towards (Hill, 2009). Bill Gates has these traits as well as many more such as being motivated, being intelligent, and being hard working. In his earliest days developing DOS he would joke about what he called his seven-hour turnaround: leave the office late at night, go home, eat, sleep, and be back in the
William Cook
COLL/148
August 14, 2011
Barbara Goldberg
Bill Gates is an effective leader and leadership role model and he is my choice for a role a model. Bill Gates has demonstrated and employed good leadership skills to be a successful business man. He has also demonstrated why he is a good role model for those who want to become leaders themselves. I believe that I share many of the leadership traits with Bill Gates and that those traits will help me in my plan for success. The reasons I chose Bill Gates as my leadership role model are as follows: he is one of the founders of Microsoft and has shown good leadership with the decisions he has made running the company and is also in the same field as my career of study which is programming. Bill Gates has many qualities of a leader, but most notably is the fact that he drove his employees hard and himself harder (Boyd, 1995). Throughout the years Bill Gates has shown his leadership capabilities through his dedication and hard work by the ever growing success of Microsoft. Another example of his leadership ability was when he released Windows 3.0 and won the battle for the first GUI operating system, he did this by keeping his hand involved in all the major, potential competitors to his pet project while also continuing development of his own product (Boyd, 1995). A few of the characteristics of an effective leader are knowing the industry in which you plan to work, building your team so that you have sufficient help to accomplish what you set out to do, and most importantly develop a vision and solid goal so the people that work for you know what they are working towards (Hill, 2009). Bill Gates has these traits as well as many more such as being motivated, being intelligent, and being hard working. In his earliest days developing DOS he would joke about what he called his seven-hour turnaround: leave the office late at night, go home, eat, sleep, and be back in the
References: Boyd, A. (1995). Smart money: the story of bill Gates. In A. Boyd, Smart money: the story of bill gates. (pp. 9-26). Greensboro: Morgan Reynolds Inc. Cook, W. (2011). Personal profile(week 2 journal entry). Rockford. Cook, W. (2011). Week 2 csi summary. Rockford. Hill, C. (2009, April). Daily news. Retrieved August 14, 2011, from NYDailyNews.com: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-04-04/news/17928884_1_leader-understands-achievable Serrano, G. (2009, April). The gates’ leadership. Retrieved August 14, 2011, from Trends Updates: http://trendsupdates.com/the-gates%E2%80%99-leadership/