Lessons Learned. Despite Bill Gates

Bill was right to be angry. And wrong about everything else.

In my previous post I shared a tantrum Bill Gates threw at my expense (and three others). It was loud, abusive, and wrong.

Except, as I reflected over the years, it wasn’t completely wrong. Oh the specifics of what he said and did were wrong, no argument.

But his anger was justified. And if he’d had the maturity to handle the situation better, we would have understood that. Learned from it.

Years later I ultimately had learned from it. But that was despite Bill, not because of him. And that’s a shame. Still, out of that there are lessons for anyone who is in a position of leadership.

Let’s recap. Our business reported cancelling several projects. They were replaced with new projects in our plan.

Billg asked us why he should believe this year’s plan would turn out any better than last year’s plan.

That was a completely fair question.

We gave the glib answer that we’d learned from our mistakes and things would be different this time.

This is where Bill lost it and went on his tirade.

And here’s the thing - he was right to push back. To not let us off the hook with some cliche BS about learning from our mistakes.

Oh sure, we should all learn from our mistakes. But do we? In real life? In our personal lives? We do not.

Bill never said what he wanted to hear, but I know now what we should have said, could have said.

When your business has cost the company millions, you’d better have a clear idea exactly why. And more importantly, what you are doing differently now.

It’s great we learned from our mistakes (or those of our predecessors). But what exactly did we learn? What have we done to address those?

In our case, we had development deals with outside companies that were unable to deliver on their promises. It’s not enough to kill those deals and sign-up new developers. What was different?

As it turns out, a lot. We’d learned to do a better job of technical due diligence. We’d partnered with the DirectX team to get their insight and support. We’d learned we needed to look at the books of our partners to ensure they were financially viable and able to finish their work for us. We ramped up our test involvement and greatly expanded our user and consumer testing.

We had learned and had taken concrete steps to address past mistakes.

And in the heat of the moment, we didn’t relay any of that.

Caught up in Bill’s rage, we just clung to the table and weathered the storm.

And that’s on Bill, 100%. When you have absolute power and wield it like a two-year-old, you’re not going to get anything from your people but fear.

My own manager tried to convince me once of the tremendous motivating power of fear. I disagreed then and disagree to this day.

This meeting was a prime example. Bill instilled fear in us, to be sure. And our thinking brains just stopped. In that moment, Bill made us stupid.

That’s not leadership, that’s bullying.

If I were in Bill’s seat, what would I have had him say?

The fact is that I think some heat was warranted. We tried to get off with a hand wave and an aphorism. We deserved to be challenged.

A more reasonable response from Bill might have been, “Learned from your mistakes? How? What did you learn? I still don’t know why I should trust you with this new plan. What is actually different?”

A little heat and a challenging tone were deserved. But crucially, the response would be aimed at eliciting more information, not just a rebuke of our glibness.

It would have made sense to go off a bit more, frankly. To chide us for that cliched response and to remind us as stewards of our business that we had an obligation to do better. To dig deeper. And to put that in the damn presentation.

What Bill missed here was an opportunity to coach us. Not just instill fear in the hopes we would do better. But to challenge us in the specific ways we were expected to run the business. Any business.

He might even have been slightly mollified to hear what we were already doing to address past issues. Might have contributed some other ideas.

Instead of merely surviving that meeting, we could have grown from it.

Growth did come, of course.

But not because of Bill. It was despite him.

Epilogue: I met with Bill many more times. And to his credit there was never anything like that tantrum again. I believe that today Bill would agree that his handling of that meeting was not what he would now choose. Might even be embarrassed by it.