Lunch with Jeff Raikes, new CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft, gave us a talk as part of the executive lunches for Microsoft MBA interns. Jeff joined Microsoft in 1981 (he probably does not have financial problems). In September, he will become the new CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

The talk covered basic topics of management. He recommeded us:

• To follow our passions
• To have a plan in life but be open to opportunities

He also talked about opportunities in business:

• For him, a good definition of high growth in business is when there are more opportunities than resources (which applies to Microsoft). You have to be good at picking the right ones. And you need to use good judgement to set the priorities and set the right tradeoffs.
• There are big opportunities when there is a paradigm shift (e.g., graphic user interface in 84). He clearly stated that innovation is not only on technology, it is also about business model transformations.

Some additional interesting comments he made:

• People usually get excited about a new trend and they get binary (either/or)
• "I'd rather have people paying for our SW; but if they have to pirate someone, I would prefer to be us"