Speech at Harvard by Bill Gates
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates delivers the Commencement address at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Degree for Harvard's most successful drop out
Bill Gates gets his degree
June 8, 2007 - 12:36PM
Text of the speech given by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates at Harvard University
on June 7, 2007.
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members
of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty,
parents, and especially, the graduates:
I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd
come back and get my degree."
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honour. I'll be changing my job next
year ... and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your
degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard's
most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special
class ... I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognised as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out
of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at
your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be
here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating.
I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn't even signed up for. And dorm life
was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots
of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone
knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be
the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of
validating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most
of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds,
if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving
your odds doesn't guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call
from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the
world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realise I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on
me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which
was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet. From that moment,
I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end
of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with
Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much
energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even
discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege - and though
I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made,
and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back ... I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world -
the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn
millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I
got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries - but in how those
discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong
public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity - reducing
inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of
educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the
millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing
countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the
world's inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I
hope you've had a chance to think about how - in this age of accelerating
technology - we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a
few dollars a month to donate to a cause - and you wanted to spend that time
and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving
lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good
for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about
the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from
diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria,
pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of,
rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year - none of them in the
United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying
and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and
deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there
were interventions that could save lives that just weren't being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn that
some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves:
"This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our
giving."
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How
could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of
these children, and governments did not subsidise it. So the children died
because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice
in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more
creative capitalism - if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more
people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are
suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the
world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the
people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate
profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a
sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It
can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will
change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is
no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be
with us till the end - because people just ... don't ... care." I completely
disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies
that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing - not because we didn't care, but
because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have
acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see
the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex
enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes,
officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate,
determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people
in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of
them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve
the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable
deaths.
We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new - and
millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where
it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's
difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's hard to look at suffering if
the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help. And so we look
away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second
step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we
have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks "How
can I help?," then we can get action - and we can make sure that none of the
caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of
action for everyone who cares - and that makes it hard for their caring to
matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable
stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the
ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest
application of the technology that you already have - whether it's something
sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bed net.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the
disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology
would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So
governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their
work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work
with what we have in hand - and the best prevention approach we have now is
getting people to avoid risky behaviour.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The
crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working - and never do what we did
with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century - which is to surrender to
complexity and quit.
The final step - after seeing the problem and finding an approach - is to
measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that
others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a
program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a
decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential
not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from
business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than
numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work - so people can feel
what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel
that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the
thrill of saving just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ...
Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring even I
couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an
event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we
had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited
about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving
lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact.
And how you do that - is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new
tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are
new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future
can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the computer,
the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty
and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan
to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is
that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts
presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for
the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is
virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of
the situation."
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me,
technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more
visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network
that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and
makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of
brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem - and that
scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this
technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of
this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant
experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute
their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because
these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one
another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for
universities, corporations, smaller organisation, and even individuals to see
problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address
the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections
of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the
benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people
here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its
intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors - the intellectual
leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review
curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities?
Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty ... the
prevalence of world hunger ... the scarcity of clean water ...the girls kept
out of school ... the children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives of the world's
least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions - you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here - never
stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she
hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she
had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she
saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter
she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given - in
talent, privilege, and opportunity - there is almost no limit to what the world
has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates
here to take on an issue - a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a
specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be
phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours
every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find
others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through
them.
Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It
will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you
have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of
global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely
also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these
people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than
we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on
what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge
yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well
you have addressed the world's deepest inequities ... on how well you treated
people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.