Home | Search

Career & Money

Health

Parenting

Personal Growth

Relationships

Religion

Part 1

Excerpted from Business @ the Speed of Thought;
Succeeding in the Digital Economy

By Bill Gates, Collins Hemingway

As the cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Microsoft,
the world's leading provider of software for personal computers, Bill
Gates played a prominent role in launching the Information Age. Now this
modern visionary reveals how expanding technology is propelling the
business world into an exciting new economic era...how every manager
can—and must—stay ahead of the curve...and how integrated information
systems can help every organization achieve...

Business @ The Speed of Thought

Chances are your company has a sizable investment in technology—and is
realizing only 20 percent of its potential benefit. As Gates explains,
you're probably viewing hardware and software as a way to solve specific
problems. But like a living organism, an organization functions best if it
can rely on a nervous system that will instantaneously deliver information
to the parts that need it. In clear, nontechnical language, Business @
The Speed of Thought shows you how a digital nervous system can unite
all systems and processes under one common infrastructure, releasing
rivers of information and allowing your company to make quantum leaps in
efficiency, growth, and profits.

With eye-opening, detailed tours into Microsoft and other major
corporations, Gates unveils the way digital nervous systems—from the
simplest to the most sophisticated—are revolutionizing the very nature of
business. You'll learn how integrated technology can:

instantly access scattered information to analyze patterns and
trends

decrease cycle time and get new products out before the
competition

deliver up-to-the-minute sales and inventory statistics on every one
of your products, anywhere in the world

help customers solve their own problems and, using intelligent
software, automatically feed complaints to designers and line workers
... and much more.

"I have a simple but strong belief," Gates writes. "How you gather,
manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose."
Business @ The Speed of Thought gives you the information you need
to win.

Introduction

Business is going to change more in the next ten years than it has in
the last fifty.

As I was preparing my speech for our first CEO summit in the spring of
1997, I was pondering how the digital age will fundamentally alter
business. I wanted to go beyond a speech on dazzling technology advances
and address questions that business leaders wrestle with all the time. How
can technology help you run your business better? How will technology
transform business? How can technology help make you a winner five or ten
years from now?

If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering,
then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly the nature of
business will change. About how quickly business itself will be
transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of
consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and
business process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in
velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes.
A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours
instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service
company that has a product offering.

These changes will occur because of a disarmingly simple idea: the flow
of digital information. We've been in the Information Age for about thirty
years, but because most of the information moving among businesses has
remained in paper form, the process of buyers finding sellers remains
unchanged. Most companies are using digital tools to monitor their basic
operations: to run their production systems; to generate customer
invoices; to handle their accounting; to do their tax work. But these uses
just automate old processes.

Very few companies are using digital technology for new processes that
radically improve how they function, that give them the full benefit of
all their employees' capabilities, and that give them the speed of
response they will need to compete in the emerging high-speed business
world. Most companies don't realize that the tools to accomplish these
changes are now available to everyone. Though at heart most business
problems are information problems, almost no one is using information
well.

Too many senior managers seem to take the absence of timely information
as a given. People have lived for so long without information at their
fingertips that they don't realize what they're missing. One of the goals
in my speech to the CEOs was to raise their expectations. I wanted them to
be appalled by how little they got in the way of actionable information
from their current IT investments. I wanted CEOs to demand a flow of
information that would give them quick, tangible knowledge about what was
really happening with their customers.

Even companies that have made significant investments in information
technology are not getting the results they could be. What's interesting
is that the gap is not the result of a lack of technology spending. In
fact, most companies have invested in the basic building blocks: PCs for
productivity applications; networks and electronic mail (e-mail) for
communications; basic business applications. The typical company has made
80 percent of the investment in the technology that can give it a healthy
flow of information yet is typically getting only 20 percent of the
benefits that are now possible. The gap between what companies are
spending and what they're getting stems from the combination of not
understanding what is possible and not seeing the potential when you use
technology to move the right information quickly to everyone in the
company.

Pages: 1   2   3   4

© 1999 by William H. Gates,
III

Tags: Management &
Leadership

Share

About the Author

Bill Gates is the chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft
Corporation. His vision and commitment regarding personal computing have
been central to the success of Microsoft and in the advancement of
software technology. He lives with his wife, Melinda, and daughter,
Jennifer, in the Seattle area. More

Collins Hemingway is director of executive communications at Microsoft
Corporation. He has been involved with Microsoft's systems products since
1987 and from 1994 to 1996 was director of international and partner
marketing of the Personal and Business Systems Division. More

Buy this book

Related articles & books

The Myths
of High Performance - Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional
Performance
Whose life do you admire the most? Whose
phenomenal success do you wish you could call your own? Have you
ever wondered what they know that you don't about the path to
success? Bill Gates started 'fooling around' with computer software
when he was a kid

We're all
coaches - I've Got Your Back: Coaching Top Performers from Center
Court to the Corner Office
On the face of it, you'd be hard
pressed to think of two guys more different than Brad Gilbert and
me. I talk about stocks on CNBC; Brad flies around the world
coaching Andy Roddick.

Harry S.
Truman on Leadership - When the Buck Stops With You: Harry S. Truman
on Leadership
'Three things can ruin a man,' Harry Truman
once said, 'power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never
had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house
right now.' For once, the Man from Missouri wasn't being 100 percent
honest.

© 2010
eNotAlone.com