There were three words missing from Bill Gates’ goodbye speech when he officially left Microsoft in July of this year. They are three words he probably doesn’t even realize need to be there. Three little words:
“I’ll be back.”
After abdicating his role as the head of Microsoft to Steve Balmer in 2000, Bill Gates has completely relinquished influence over the company he built so he can lend more time and energy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But Gates forgot to do one thing that would allow his plan to work. This one oversight could have a devastating impact on Microsoft and will require him to come back in 3 to 5 years to right the ship.
Bill Gates is special. Not because of his brain or his management style. Though important, those two things alone are not the formula for building a multi-billion dollar corporation from scratch. Like all visionary leaders, Bill Gates is special because he physically embodies what he believes.
When Gates founded Microsoft just over 30 years ago, he did so to advance a higher cause. A noble purpose. He believes that technology is the great equalizer. Give people the right tools, make people more productive, and everyone, no matter their lot in life, will have an opportunity to achieve their real potential. “A PC in every home and on every desk,” he envisioned (which is remarkable from a company that didn’t make PCs). He saw the PC as the great equalizer. Microsoft’s most successful software, Windows, allowed anyone to have access to powerful technology. Tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, gave everyone the power to realize the promise of the new technology – to become more efficient and productive. Small businesses, for example, could look and act like big businesses. Microsoft’s software are the tools that helped Gates advance his cause to empower the “every man.” It was Gates who is responsible for the advancement of personal computer. Gates put a PC on every desk and in doing so he changed the world.
Gates is important to Microsoft because he physically embodies his vision. He is the “every man.” He dresses like you and me. He drives his own car. He is understated. He his not flamboyant with his wealth. Bill Gates is the original vision of Microsoft.
So what happens now that he’s gone?
Such a departure is not without precedent among companies with equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, a man who personifies the notion of challenging the status quo, who is the physical embodiment of “Think Different,” left Apple in 1985 to start Next. He left the company in the hands of a capable executive, Pepsi’s John Scully. The problem was, Scully ran the company as a business and not as a tool to achieve a higher purpose. The company thrived on Jobs’s fumes for a few years and then it started to falter. Not until Job’s return in 1996 did Apple reinstate it’s power for innovation, for thinking different and to, once again, redefine industries.
Michael Dell had a cause. One he didn’t effectively communicate before he stepped down as CEO in July, 2004. And when the company started to weaken with him gone, he came back in fewer than 3 years. In 2000 Howard Schultz resigned as CEO of Starbucks. And for the first time in it’s history, Starbucks started to crack. Schultz returned in 2007 to put things right.
Jobs, Dell, Schultz and Gates are not God’s gift to management. Their companies are thousands of people deep and they alone can’t pull all the strings or push all the buttons to make everything work properly. They rely on the brains and the management skills of teams of people. In this respect, they are no different from any other executive. But what they all have in common, something not all CEOs have, is that they physically embody the cause around which they built their companies. Their mere existence reminds every executive and every employee why they show up to work. Put simply: they inspire.
Like Bill Gates, these inspired leaders failed to properly articulate their cause in words that others could rally around. And as a result, they are the only ones who could lead their movement. But they still have the same challenge – what happens when they leave again?
The best thing Dell, Schultz and Jobs can do while they are back is to make sure that everyone knows why the company was founded in the first place. What’s the cause they are there to champion? What movement are they leading? Why should anyone care?
Schultz hasn’t done it yet. He is back at Starbucks talking about coffee. There aren’t many employees at Starbucks who are truly inspired by coffee. In fact, if you go back to the history of Starbucks, it wasn’t even coffee that originally excited Schultz, it was opening coffee shops. It was the vision of building a space between work and home that allowed Starbucks to single-handedly drive a coffee-shop culture in the United States. Talking about coffee will not re-energize employees at Starbucks and it will not drive innovation. And, more importantly, it will not prepare the company for when Schultz leaves again. Schultz needs to refocus the company around the coffee shop experience, not the product they serve.
Gates made the same mistake. As the company grew, he stopped talking about what he believed and how he was going to change the world and started talking about what the company was doing. Microsoft changed. Founded as a company that believed in making people more productive so they could achieve their highest potential they became a company that simply made software products. Such a seemly subtle change impacts behaviors. It alters decisions. And it impacts how a company structures itself for the future. Though Microsoft has changed since its founding, the impact was not as dramatic because at least Bill Gates was there, the physical embodiment of the cause that inspired his executives and employees.
But now he’s gone.
Gates left to do something else that also embodies his cause – to use the Gates Foundation to help people around the world wake up everyday to achieve their potential. The only difference is he’s not doing with software anymore. Steve Balmer, a smart man by all accounts, does not physically embody Gates’ vision of the world. Balmer is not seen as a humble man. He is not “one of us.” He has an image as a powerful executive who sees numbers and not people. Like John Scully at Apple, Jim Donald at Starbucks and Kevin Rollins at Dell – all the CEOs who replaced the visionary founders – Balmer might be the perfect man to work alongside a visionary but is he the perfect man to replace one? The entire culture of all these companies was built around one man’s vision. The only succession plan that will work is to find a CEO who believes in and wants to continue to lead that movement, not replace it with their own vision of the future. Balmer knows how to rally the company but can he inspire it?
Successful succession is more than selecting someone with an appropriate skill set, it’s about finding someone who is in lock-step with the original cause around which the company was founded. Great second or third CEOs don’t take the helm to implement their own vision of the future, they pick up the original banner and lead the company into the next generation. That’s why we call it succession, not replacement. There is a continuity of vision.
Gates’ departure from Microsoft is no different from the founder/CEO departures at Starbucks, Dell and Apple. If Microsoft does not clearly articulate the cause around which the company was built, then no matter who takes over, Gates will have to come back in 3 to 5 years. Like the other examples, he will need to return to remind everyone the cause by simply being Bill. If that cause is not clearly articulated and if Gates doesn’t come back, then Microsoft probably only has about 5-7 good years left before it starts to look like AOL, Netscape or Yahoo – other once-mighty forces who, after the vision left with their respective founders, floundered about only to become irrelevant in the long-term shaping of an economy.
Have fun in Africa Bill and see you in a few years.
This piece also appeared in The Huffington Post.
