VUCA Master. A person who has demonstrated agility fitness when anticipating or confronting personal, societal, environmental or business disruption and turbulence.
Bill Gates is a VUCA Master. Bill Gates represents one of the series of VUCA Master stories/biographies intended to help others effectively demonstrate leadership agility fitness regardless of the disruptive VUCA they face. Gates has demonstrated his ability to master the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) experienced during his lifetime of change in the world of technology and society.
My forthcoming book, VUCA Masters: Developing Leadership Agility Fitness for a New World of Work, profiles other examples of VUCA Masters and provides a navigational plan to support the development of Leadership Agility Fitness. VUCA, a term developed by the US Army, refers to an operating environment that is constantly changing in conflicting, dramatic, and relentless ways resulting in leadership and organizational challenges. As we continue wrestling with the COVID-19 Pandemic, I hope you can apply what you learn from The VUCA Masters series.
Bill Gates VUCA Challenges and Actions.
Bill Gates and his business partner Paul Allen created the world’s largest software business, Microsoft. Gates became one of the richest men in the world. In February 2014, he stepped down from leading Microsoft to focus on charitable work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 1975, Gates and Allen formed Micro-Soft, a blend of “micro-computer” and “software.” The name was changed to Microsoft in 1976. The company’s first product was BASIC software that ran on the Altair computer but only about 10 percent of the people using BASIC in the Altair computer had actually paid for it.
In the early 1980s, Gates convinced IBM that he and his company could meet their needs. At that time, Microsoft had not developed the operating system that would run IBM’s new computers. So Gates bought an operating system that was developed to run on computers similar to IBM’s PC. Gates adapted the newly purchased software to work for the IBM PC.
Gates announced that a new Microsoft operating system called “Windows,” would be compatible with all PC software products developed on the MS-DOS system. The announcement was a bluff, in that Microsoft had no such program under development. Nearly 30 percent of the computer market was using the MS-DOS system and would wait for Windows software rather than change to a new system.
Gates’ intelligence enabled him to understand all aspects of the software industry, from product development to corporate strategy. When analyzing any corporate move, he applied scenario thinking by asking questions about anything that could possibly happen. Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft was faced with Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department investigations. At one point, Microsoft faced a possible breakup of its two divisions — operating systems and software development. Microsoft was able to find a settlement with the federal government to avoid a breakup.
Since stepping down from Microsoft, Gates devotes much of his time and energy to the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2017, the foundation launched the first of its annual “Goalkeepers” report, an examination of progress made in several important areas related to public health. After years of warning that the world was not ready for the next pandemic, Gates saw his ominous words come true with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in 2020. In March, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed with the Wellcome Trust and Mastercard to pledge $125 million toward efforts to help curb the outbreak.
VUCA Master Capabilities — Watch the Bill Gates Biography. Using the Snapshot form provided, assess the VUCA faced by Bill Gates and then evaluate how he demonstrated Leadership Agility.
VUCA Master Webinar — Consider scheduling a webinar with your team to view the Bill Gates Biography video, discuss how Gates demonstrated Leadership Agility Fitness and then plan how the Leadership Agility Fitness capabilities can be assessed and developed within your organization. Here is a very brief Leadership Agility Fitness video that can share with your colleagues to help accelerate the journey to developing VUCA Masters in your organization.
