(Fuente: Pato Navia, 11 de Junio de 2007)
June 8, 2007 - 12:36PM
Text of the speech given by Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates at Harvard University on June 7, 2007.
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 fascinating. 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
Radcliff, 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.
Radcliff 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, 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 discouraging, 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 awareness 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 millions 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 and they could be
saved, the world would make it a priority to
discover and deliver the medicines to save them.
But it did not. For under a dollar, there were
interventions 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 capitalism
- 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 generate 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
finished. 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, officials 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 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
problem 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
individual 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,
discover the ideal technology for that approach,
and in the meantime, make the smartest
application of the technology that you already
have - whether it's something sophisticated, like
a drug, or something simpler, like a bed net.
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 behaviour.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle
again. This is the pattern. The crucial 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 complexity and quit.
The final step - after seeing the problem and
finding an approach - is to measure 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 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 experience especially striking was
that I had just come from an event where we were
introducing 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 computer, the Internet -
give us a chance we've never had before to end
extreme poverty 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 impossible 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 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 network 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 brilliant 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 technology, five people
don't. That means many creative minds are left
out of this discussion -- smart people with
practical intelligence and relevant 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 organization,
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 collections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the
alumni, the students, and the benefactors 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 leaders 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.
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 talent, 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 interests, 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 people a world away who
have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
