President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members
of
the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of
the faculty,
parents, and especially, the graduates:
I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d
come back and get my degree.”
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year
… and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your
degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s
most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of
my own special
class … I did the best of everyone who failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out
of
business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your
graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinat-
ing. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was
terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people
in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t
worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the
anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all
those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most
of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds,
if
you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving
your odds doesn’t guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made
a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making
the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up
on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which
was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment,
© 2007 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
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Bill Gates
Address at Harvard
Commencement, July 7, 2007
William Henry Gates III is the co-founder and Chairman of
the Microsoft
Corporation and the co-founder and Co-Chair of
the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.
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I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my
college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much
energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even dis-
couraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege—and though I left
early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the
ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real aware-
ness of
the awful inequities in the
world—the appalling disparities of
health,
and wealth,
and opportunity
that condemn millions of
people to
lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard
about new ideas in economics and
politics.
I got great exposure to the
advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances
are not in its discoveries—but in how
those discoveries are applied to
reduce inequity.
Whether through democracy,
strong public education,
quality
health care,
or broad economic opportunity—reducing inequity is the highest
human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of
educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the mil-
lions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the
world’s inequities than the classes that came before.
In your years here,
I hope
you’ve had a chance to think about how—in this age of accelerating technology—
we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a
few dollars a month to donate to a cause—and you wanted to spend that time and
money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives.
Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same:
how can we do the most
good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about
the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases
that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia,
hepatitis B,
yellow fever.
One disease I had never even heard of,
rotavirus,
was
killing half a million kids each year—none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying
Bill Gates
[H]umanity’s greatest
advances are not in its
discoveries—but in how
those discoveries are
applied to reduce inequity.
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Address at Harvard
and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliv-
er the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were inter-
ventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
If
you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some
lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t
be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked:
“How could the world let these children die?”
The answer is simple,
and
harsh.
The market did not reward
saving the lives of
these children,
and governments did not subsidize
it.
So the children died because
their mothers and their fathers had
no power in the market and no
voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces
work better for the poor if
we can
develop a more creative capital-
ism—if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a
profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst
inequities.
We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer
money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that gener-
ate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable
way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be fin-
ished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no
hope. They say:“Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us
till the end—because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of
us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies
that broke our hearts,
and yet we did nothing—not because we didn’t care,
but
because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have
acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the
impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of
the Internet and 24-hour news,
it is still a complex
enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, offi-
cials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine
the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.
But if
the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of
all the people in
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We can make market forces
work better for the poor if
we can develop a more
creative capitalism...
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the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them
were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the prob-
lem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”
The bigger problem is not the plane crash,
but the millions of
preventable
deaths.
We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new—and
millions of
people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s
easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep
our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex
that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.
If
we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second
step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we
have clear and proven answers
anytime an organization or indi-
vidual asks “How can I help?,”
then we can get action—and we
can make sure that none of
the
caring in the world is wasted. But
complexity makes it hard to mark
a path of action for everyone who
cares—and that makes it hard for
their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity
to find a solution runs through
four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, dis-
cover the ideal technology for that approach,
and in the meantime,
make the
smartest application of the technology that you already have—whether it’s some-
thing sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the
disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would
be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug
companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take
more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in
hand—and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid
risky behavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The cru-
cial thing is to never stop thinking and working—and never do what we did with
malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century—which is to surrender to complexi-
ty and quit.
The final step—after seeing the problem and finding an approach—is to meas-
ure the impact of
your work and share your successes and failures so that others
learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of
course. You have to be able to show that a
Bill Gates
If we can really see a
problem, which is the first
step, we come to the second
step: cutting through the
complexity to find a solution.
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Address at Harvard
program is vaccinating millions more children.
You have to be able to show a
decline in the number of
children dying from these diseases. This is essential not
just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business
and government.
But if
you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than
numbers; you have to convey the human impact of
the work—so people can feel
what saving a life means to the families affected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health
panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill
of
saving just one person’s
life—then multiply that by
millions. … Yet this was the
most boring panel I’ve ever
been on—ever.
So boring
even I couldn’t bear it.
What made that experi-
ence especially striking was
that I had just come from an
event where we were intro-
ducing version 13 of
some
piece of
software,
and we
had people jumping and
shouting with excitement.
I
love getting people excited
about software—but why
can’t we generate even more
excitement for saving lives?
You can’t get people
excited unless you can help
them see and feel the impact. And how you do that—is a complex question.
Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools
we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new—
they can help us make the most of
our caring—and that’s why the future can be
different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of
this age—biotechnology, the com-
puter, the Internet—give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme pover-
ty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced
a plan to assist the nations of
post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is
that the problem is one of
such enormous complexity that the very mass of
facts
presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man
in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossi-
ble at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”
Thirty years after Marshall made his address,
as my class graduated without
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Cutting through complexity to
find a solution runs through
four predictable stages:
determine a goal, find the
highest-leverage approach,
discover the ideal technology for
that approach, and in the
meantime, make the smartest
application of the technology
that you already have.
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me,
technology was emerging that would make the world smaller,
more open,
more visible, less distant.
The emergence of
low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful net-
work that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and
makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of
bril-
liant minds we can have working together on the same problem—and that scales
up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technol-
ogy, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discus-
sion—smart people with
practical intelligence and rel-
evant experience who don’t
have the technology to hone
their talents or contribute
their ideas to the world.
We need as many people
as possible to have access to
this
technology,
because
these advances are triggering
a revolution in what human
beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national
governments,
but for universities,
corporations,
smaller organizations,
and even
individuals to see problems,
see approaches,
and measure the impact of
their
efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of
60 years ago.
Members of
the Harvard Family:
Here in the Yard is one of
the great collec-
tions of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the bene-
factors of
Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of
people here and
around the world.
But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to
improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of
the deans and the professors—the intellectual lead-
ers here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and
determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities?
Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence
of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the
children who die from diseases we can cure?
Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s
least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions—you will answer with your policies.
Bill Gates
Don’t let complexity stop you.
Be activists. Take on the big
inequities. It will be one of the
great experiences of your lives.
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Address at Harvard
My mother,
who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here—never
stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding,
she
hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had
written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one
more opportunity to deliver her message,
and at the close of
the letter she said:
“From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given—in tal-
ent, privilege, and opportunity—there is almost no limit to what the world has a
right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here
to take on an issue—a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist
on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you
don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use
the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same inter-
ests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be
one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of
age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard,
you have technology that members of
my class never had. You have awareness of
global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also
have an informed conscience that will torment you if
you abandon these people
whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had;
you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect
on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge
yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well
you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated peo-
ple a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
Remarks by Bill Gates at the Harvard University Commencement Ceremony in
Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 7, 2007. Reprinted with the permission of the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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