Thursday, June 21, 2007 Ng: Inspiring messages from Jobs and Gates By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
JUNE is the month of weddings. It is also the start of the school year here.
But in the United States, which does not have the same academic year as ours, it is traditionally graduation month. Two years ago, Stanford University, one of the most prominent universities in the US and acknowledged as the thought and education center of Silicon Valley, invited Apple Computers chief executive officer Steve Jobs to be their commencement speaker.
Jobs speech titled, “Stay Hungry, Stay foolish,” became a very big hit and was talked about in various articles. I received many copies of that through my email as many people thought it was inspiring. That speech, delivered on June 12, can be found on the Stanford University website (http://news-service. stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)
On June 7, 2007 Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, was invited to be the commencement speaker at Harvard University.
Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft and, in the last 10 years, is the world’s richest man as well as the world’s most generous philanthropist having donated over $30 billion to various charities.
In his speech, Gates lauded the new ideas in economics and politics that he learned from Harvard, as well as the rapid advances made in various sciences. However, he said the most important advancement and achievement that we can rightly say should be our focus is reducing inequity.
He said his greatest regret was that the school or even the system did not allow its students to understand better the millions of people who live in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
He said he read that millions of children are dying every year of measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, and yellow fever. He could not understand why this was not apparent to Americans.
In fact, a disease called rotavirus kills 500,000 kids a year, but most of Americans probably never heard about it, because it is almost unheard of in the United States.
Apparently, the reason why people died of such diseases, Gates said, is that the market or the democratic economy did not reward the saving of these children’s lives, and government could not and did not subsidize therefore its cure. So the children died because their parents had no power (no money) in the market and no voice in the system.
Gates challenged the people to work so that market forces can become more responsive to the poor, so that capitalism can reach out its hands so more people can make a profit, or at least a living, by serving individuals who are suffering from the worst inequities.
He stressed ways to enable policies of government, as well as spend public money in the government, so that profits for businesses and votes for politicians will come to those people who can help reduce inequity.
He also said that it is not because we don’t care. All of us, he said, have seen human tragedies. In most cases we did nothing, not because we don’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we have known how to help, many of us would have acted. So the barrier to getting people to change is not that they don’t want to, but because it was too complex.
So the solution is to get people to start to see the problem, forward a solution and enable the people who are helping to immediately see the impact.
Gates believes that pretty soon, emerging technology that makes our world smaller, more open, more visible and less distant will help solve these problems as more and more people are able to use technology to cut through the complexity.
It is a moving speech, and forces us to re-think through our goals. If you want to read it, check http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.14/99-gates.html.
