Week 2 Assignment

Week 2 Assignment

[Author Name(s), First M. Last, Omit Titles and Degrees]

[Institutional Affiliation(s)]

Author Note

[Include any grant/funding information and a complete correspondence address.]

Week 2 Assignment

Interview with Bill Gates

Kindly tell us about yourself and your partner during the process of creating Microsoft?

Hello, Thank You for the opportunity. Well, back in the day, it was pretty dynamic. New machines and computers were coming out, and even though very fewer people had joined me at the start, most of the time was allocated to programming and coding. Financially the times were hard and recruiting people in the pursuit of growth was harder. The co-founder Paul Allen played a pivotal role in creating the early dynamism of the software and helped to magnify it into its contemporary form.

What was the unique feature that made your software products stand out from the rest?

The Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) used by us was quite deep in its operation and our contemporaries were using a limited code ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"LNkU1snQ","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Shiv et al., 2019)","plainCitation":"(Shiv et al., 2019)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":52,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/R3lWGnc9/items/95TEDAVP"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/R3lWGnc9/items/95TEDAVP"],"itemData":{"id":52,"type":"paper-conference","title":"Microsoft Icecaps: An Open-Source Toolkit for Conversation Modeling","container-title":"ACL","source":"Semantic Scholar","abstract":"The Intelligent Conversation Engine: Code and Pre-trained Systems (Microsoft ICECAPS) is an upcoming open-source natural language processing repository. ICECAPS wraps TensorFlow functionality in a modular componentbased architecture, presenting an intuitive and flexible paradigm for constructing sophisticated learning setups. Capabilities include multitask learning between models with shared parameters, upgraded language model decoding features, a range of built-in architectures, and a user-friendly data processing pipeline. The system is targeted toward conversational tasks, exploring diverse response generation, coherence, and knowledge grounding. ICECAPS also provides pretrained conversational models that can be either used directly or loaded for fine-tuning or bootstrapping other models; these models power an online demo of our framework.","DOI":"10.18653/v1/p19-3021","shortTitle":"Microsoft Icecaps","author":[{"family":"Shiv","given":"Vighnesh Leonardo"},{"family":"Quirk","given":"Chris"},{"family":"Suri","given":"Anshuman"},{"family":"Gao","given":"Xiang"},{"family":"Shahid","given":"Khuram"},{"family":"Govindarajan","given":"Nithya"},{"family":"Zhang","given":"Yizhe"},{"family":"Gao","given":"Jianfeng"},{"family":"Galley","given":"Michel"},{"family":"Brockett","given":"Chris"},{"family":"Menon","given":"Tulasi"},{"family":"Dolan","given":"Bill"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2019"]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Shiv et al., 2019). I guess this is what made them come to us in the end.

Can you talk a little bit about the strategy you envisioned for Microsoft as a company?

The strategy envisioned for the company implied relentless efforts to design and innovate micro-processing products. We faced barriers, but we never let any limitations stop us from providing the public with a vast range of consumer goods.

Kindly postulate three things which are unique to Microsoft’s way of software.

Hiring smart, highly skilled people

Working with small, super-focused teams

Designing products with built-in efficiency and speed

How would you describe your leadership style?

Well, that’s a great question. I am considered as a really interesting specimen when it comes to studying leadership styles. I certainly believe in the value of incorporating the inputs from all groups of my employees and you can label it as a participative leadership style. I have some unique traits which I think are the drivers to my business’s success. Focusing on the one thing that I am passionate about, software, taking a pragmatic approach towards setting my goals and achieving them, embracing creativity, reading books and blogging about them are some of the core values that make me the leader that I am. I work tirelessly and I am always looking forward to new opportunities. In my leadership style and management, contemporary, passionate individuals can find a lot of transformational qualities and the fact that true happiness can only be achieved by helping the unfortunate.

How would you describe your role to the health of your organization?

Describing myself as a technocrat at heart, but not believing in technology as the true savior of all problems faced by the human race, corresponds to the current health of my organization. I love Information Technology and some of the amazing wonders it is doing in this world, but there are some issues of primal nature, which technology cannot solve, for instance, malnutrition or abject poverty. “Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I’m thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t.”

I am 58 years old, but I still have the calm and poise of my days as a young adult. I am the first one to fathom the possibility of seeping computation in the events and experiences of every-day life, but I am certain of the fact that technology can only do so much for this world’s poorest and the most unprivileged segment of the population.

What is your definition of success?

I take great care in the matter that I don't dwell too much on success. After all, life is a constant series of failures, and without any bad days, learning and further growth are not possible. I think that the level of competition I am currently facing is a success for me as I have led numerous people to surpass me in my efforts.

What if you are given a chance to change one thing about your life?

As I mentioned earlier, being rich does not solve everything in this world. I could still do some help with time management as currently, I am unable to make time for my engineers and my philanthropic activities.

Thank you for your time.

Analysis

The interviewee exhibits a participative or democratic leadership style, which alludes to the encouragement of direct interactions with the employees, but the supreme authority to make decisions is associated with the leader CITATION Cha19 \l 1033 (Chan, 2019). Reflecting on the interview, Bill Gates successfully fulfills the criteria of being a participative leader as he acts as a facilitator for his employees and conducts surveys about the company's processes regularly.

In the fiscal year 2018-19, the business associated with commercial cloud computing of Microsoft generated more than $24 billion, surpassing the initial target of $20 billion, and the gross margin was also expanded by 7 points compared to last year. Likewise, offerings and innovative opportunities across customer services are also being broadened, and there is more diversity in the organization's workforce and human resources to accommodate the computing needs globally with creative solutions ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"WkD8d9iP","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(\\uc0\\u8220{}Microsoft Annual Report 2018,\\uc0\\u8221{} n.d.)","plainCitation":"(“Microsoft Annual Report 2018,” n.d.)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":50,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/R3lWGnc9/items/DQP2B3KM"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/R3lWGnc9/items/DQP2B3KM"],"itemData":{"id":50,"type":"webpage","title":"Microsoft Annual Report 2018","URL":"https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/annualreports/ar2018/annualreport","language":"en-us","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",11,6]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (“Microsoft Annual Report 2018,” n.d.).

The health assessment of the interviewee's organization directly corresponds with his leadership style, and a thorough review of his organizational performance in the last fiscal year is indicative of this mutually symbiotic relationship.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chan, S. C. (2019). Participative leadership and job satisfaction. Leadership & Organization Development Journal.

Last Name, F. M. (Year). Article Title. Journal Title, Pages From - To.

Last Name, F. M. (Year). Book Title. City Name: Publisher Name.

ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Microsoft Annual Report 2018. (n.d.). Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/annualreports/ar2018/annualreport

Shiv, V. L., Quirk, C., Suri, A., Gao, X., Shahid, K., Govindarajan, N., Dolan, B. (2019). Microsoft Icecaps: An Open-Source Toolkit for Conversation Modeling. ACL. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-3021