(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child)
One-on-One Interview with Bill Hybels & Melinda Gates
Bill: I’ve admired you from afar for a long time. You’ve been blessed with a lot of
resources and have given back to the world.
Melinda: Thank
you. That’s very kind.
Bill: I think
people really only know you from the Gates Foundation. You grew up in a highly functioning
family and went to a Catholic school.
You said you became an impatient optimist. What does that mean.
Melinda: Our
parents were very determined we would grow up in the Catholic faith. What I learned is that the world is
getting better. Poverty has been
cut in half in the last 25 years.
That makes me optimistic, but I’m impatient that there are things we
have in the US that could be given to the developing world that will hasten
change. We believe all lives are
created equal but we need to treat them equally.
Bill:
Agreed. What did you study
at Duke University.
Melinda:
Computer Science. I loved
technology. I had a high school
teacher who saw I was good at math and she advocated for us to get a dozen
computers and I learned programming.
The number of women graduates in computer science peaked at 38% and is
now back down to 17%.
Bill: Was Microsoft the only company offer you received.
Melinda: I
actually worked for IBM several summers in Dallas. Our parents encouraged us to
go to college in a different geograpic area. As a senior I was asked to commit to IBM but I said I was
going to Seattle to interview with Microsoft. She said if I got an offer at Microsoft I should take it
because the chance for advancement would be so great.
Bill: So you
were hired at Microsoft and you actually loved working there and were invited
into leadership.
Melinda: I worked
there for over nine years and I believed in the vision of putting a computer in
every home. I loved managing
teams. I felt like if you got the
best out of people you got the best end result.
Bill: How did
you just run into Bill Gates?
Melinda: The
company was really small—fewer than 1700 employees. After three weeks on the job I was sent to New York to
present. I had a female roommate
who invited me to go out to dinner with other employees and twenty minutes
later Bill Gates arrived.
Bill: Was this
love at first sight?
Melinda: I
wouldn’t call it that. He asked me
to go out that night, but I had other plans. A few months later we ran into each other at work on a
Saturday afternoon and he asked me out again. Apparently he was a little smitten. After we were married and I got
pregnant I surprised him by saying I wanted to stay home with them. I told him it didn’t mean I would
be home forever but that I’d be home for a time. Jen is 20 years old, Rory is 17, Phoebe is in 8th
grade.
Bill: Are they
normal?
Melinda: I
wanted a normal family life. I
dated Bill when he was already known in the world. I wanted our kids to have a normal middle class
upbringing. I used my maiden name
when I enrolled the kids in school so no one would know they as “Bill Gates’
kids”.
Bill: I was
interested in your spiritual practices.
In your attempt to stay close to God, what do you do?
Melinda: I
think one of the really important things I learned in high school is that one
individual can change the world. They also taught us the importance of silent and took us on
silent retreats. They gave us
spiritual lectures and readings.
In the middle of the school was a chapel where you could spend time in
silence. That became so
fundamental to my life that I try to take time in silence every day. I do a spiritual reading, light a
candle, and spend some time in prayer.
Bill: I want to
move ahead to talk about the Gates Foundation. You give away billions and billions of dollars. You have your own building with 1400
employees. Tell us how the
foundation functions.
Melinda: The
foundation is the embodiment of our philosophy in the world. We think of it as a huge
responsibility. It’s a gift to be
in this situation. We’re giving
away other people’s money—like Warren Buffett’s money. We’re trying to give bak to the world
responsibility. We’re trying to
allow all people to have the same healthy start in life we have here in the
US.
Bill: You’ve
given hundreds of millions of dollars to get kids vaccinated around the world
and staggering investments in education around the world. The one that was blowing my mind
recently was your work on the timing and placement of pregnancies. Start from zero and explain this.
Melinda: We
think of this foundation as a learning journey. We were working on childhood vaccines and now there are 7
million children alive because of those vaccines. As we are doing this work I spend time time sitting with
women in the villages. You have to
listen. I ask about vaccines but
what I learned is if I stay long enough and listen to them what they wanted to
talk about is “what about that shot I used to get?”—they were talking about
depo prevara. There was a crisis
that contraception was not available.
Condoms are being given out but women will tell you they can’t negotiate
a husband using a condom. The
women know if they can space their children they will be able to feed them and
educate them better. I kept
thinking there has to be someone who will lead this call. I’ve been part of leading this charge
to make contraceptives available to all women. I’ve had lots of meetings with the Catholic Church and we
move forward on our areas of commonalities. I want to keep alive women and babies.
Bill: You’re
actually an introvert more than an extrovert. Is this just something God wanted you to do?
Melinda: You
can’t turn away from these voices.
When I come back from these trips I take time in silence so I can hear
these cries. You need to let your
heart break and take it in. If I
could do something about that, I needed to act. The truth needs to be spoken. We can do something about this.
Bill: At some
point in time you and Bill felt ‘we’ve just earned too much money’ and knew the
right thing to do was to invest in the world. Yet there are many who don’t have a social conscience and
just keep earning. How does it
affect you to see people of great means who do virtually nothing for the poor.
Melinda: We
made this decision before we got married.
We made a trip to Africa and realized we only need so much. Warren Buffet says if you have close to
a billion dollars it’s not going to hurt you to give away half of it. I grew up in a middle class family and
we were giving back. We started
presenting this to the wealthy and we have 155 billionaires signed up to give
away half their wealth. We gather
those who want to give once a year and they begin to catch the vision of giving
and see the possibilities.
Bill: You’re
helping the world awaken to the fact this is not good money thrown at hopeless
projects. Extreme poverty and
child mortality rates have been cut in half.
Melinda: Part
of that is bed nets—for $10 you can buy a net to reduce deaths.
Bill: Maternal
mortality rates have fallen by 43% and proportion of undernourished people has
fallen to half.
Melinda: I go
to places that used to feel destitute and they’re starting to thrive. Seeds that give 1/3 more profit on
their farms have made a difference.
Bill: One thing
I appreciate about you and Bill is you took your intellectual horsepower and
built a company and then took that same horsepower and used it to help the
poor. Was it harder to build
Microsoft or is it harder to leverage the resources to solve world problems.
Melinda: Bill
would say he did a lot of things right but he also got lucky. He never expected to make a billion
dollars. When we came to this
nonprofit we started to see how hard this was but the biggest lesson we could apply
from business is that we used data to evaluate. In the nonprofit world many decisions were being made
without data so we worked to get that data. One of Bill’s goals is to eliminate polio in the world. He gets reports of new polio cases and
they send out vaccination teams.
Now we send women into the developing world to ask about contraceptive
questions and what is available and I get those reports coded red, green, and
yellow. We know where malaria nets
are being applied and where they’re working and where they’re not. Warren Buffett says we are working on
the tough problems that society has ignored but we are getting the data and
working to make changes. I can’t
ask people to give unless I can show them their giving makes a difference.
Bill: You were
making a presentation to spiritual leaders about these needs and I saw you
moved to tears. It’s still very
personal to you.
Melinda: It’s
in the humanity of work that you connect with other people. I have gone into those villages and
lived that life so it’s very personal.
The people I meet in the developing world open up and show me what life
is like. A woman in a village
said, “I want to give every good thing to this child before I have another one.”
Bill: Why don’t
we thank Melinda for all the good work she’s doing.
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