A Visionary Leader: Traits

1. Bill Gates:

A Visionary Leader: Traits

If we are talking creativity and ideas, Bill Gates is an American unoriginal. He is Microsoft's chief and co-founder, he is the world's richest man, and his career delivers this message: It can be wiser to follow than to lead. Let the innovators hit the beaches and take the losses; if you hold back and follow, you can clean up in peace and quiet. Gates is the Bing Crosby of American technology, granted he is an unusually hard-driving and successful businessman.

A 1968 photo shows Bill as a rapt young teenager, watching his friend Paul Allen type at a computer terminal. Allen became a co-founder of Microsoft. The child Gates has neat hair and an eager, pleasant smile; every last detail says "pat me on the head." He entered Harvard but dropped out to found Microsoft in 1975.

Microsoft's first product was a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800, arguably the world's first personal computer. BASIC, invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1964, was someone else's idea. So was the Altair. Gates merely plugged one into the other, cream-cheesed the waiting bagel and came up with a giant hit.

The world pondered Gates and assumed he must be a great thinker. During World War II, Cargo Cults flourished on New Guinea and Melanesia: people who had never seen an airplane pondered incoming U.S. aircraft and assumed they must be divine. Technology is confusing, and these were reasonable guesses under the circumstances. In 1995 Gates published a book