4Prox

Advice from Harvard's "most successful failure".

Bill Gates, quoted in the Wall Street Journal (June 8, 2007), urged Harvard Graduates to take on an issue and "become a specialist on it" even if they devote just a few hours every week.

A four point plan for attacking a complex problem:

1.   Determine a goal
2.    Find the "highest leverage approach".
3.    Discover the ideal technology for that approach
4.    ...in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology you have.

Bill Gates' philanthropic work is an extraordinary mix of  intense compassion, an acute analytical mind and bold execution...and he's still a relative young man.  Over the next 30 years he will have huge influence on policy and global inequality. 

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time.

Maurice Saatchi gives wise advice to start up businesses in the FT May 29, 2007:

It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe, where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by perception. And, as Freud’s Law of Ambivalence stated, human beings are so complicated that they can love and hate the same object at the same time.

"People do not know what they want until a brilliant person shows them. Henry Ford confirmed the point. Asked if he had carried out research before he invented the Model T Ford, he replied: “If I had asked people what they wan­ted, I would have built a faster horse.”

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practised by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere. They are the people that are needed to help advertisers navigate the internet because, as Aristotle knew 2,000 years ago: “Fire burns both here and in Persia. But what is thought just changes before our eyes. The decision rests with perception.”

If anybody should know this it is the founding geniuses of Google – the living embodiment of the irrational human dream of “two men in a garage” who change the world.

Lord Saatchi is an executive director of M&C Saatchi"