Entrepreneurial lessons from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 17 May 2011, 23:49 IST   |    3 Comments
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Entrepreneurial lessons from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer
Bangalore: If you ask the graduates of the passing Class of 2011 at Southern California University, what they got from their college to carry home as a memento to remember, the students are bound to say Steve Ballmer's commencement speech. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave the commencement speech last Friday at the University of Southern California, imparting lessons learned over the last few decades upon the latest group of graduates. "Number one, great ideas matter. Number two, find passion and, number three be tenacious, be irrepressible" preached Ballmer to the students. He said these were three keys things that he learnt in Micorsoft. Ballmer made the parents of the students to walk down the memory lane, to remind them of their college days. He explained how difficult it was to write a term paper without a word processor and without the Internet. And now Information technology has shaped the world in such a way like none other in the human history. Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956. He was born in Detroit, Michigan. In 1973, he graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a private college preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan, and now sits on its board of directors. In 1977, he graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in mathematics and economics. At college, Ballmer managed the football team, worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He then worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who later became CEO of General Electric. In 1980, he dropped out of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business to join Microsoft. Ballmer's entry into Microsoft was during those days when he was doing his MBA at the Stanford University. Bill Gates who went to college with Ballmer offered him to join his venture. When Ballmer explained this to his father, his father had no clue of what a software was and neither did his mother have any clue about it, who ended up asking him why would a person ever need a computer? Later Baller quit his business school and joined Gates. As Albert Einstein once said "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination," and that is what Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. They dared to imagine a world of microprocessors and computers which was never thought of before. Ballmer explains that Microsoft was a result of one single good idea by two individuals, which has ended up with every home having a computer. Another way to sort of grab this idea about ideas and direction, Ballmer quoted Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky said "good hockey players skate to where the puck is; great hockey players will skate to where the puck is going to be." Ballmer went on to speak about the second key thing: Passion. He said "This is not an easy one. People think passion is something you either have or you don't. People think passion is something that has to manifest itself in some kind of explosive and emotional format. It's not. It's the thing that you find in your life that you can care about, that you can cling to, that you can invest yourself in, heart, body, and soul. Finding passion is kind of your job now." Speaking about his passion, Ballmer said like every other young individual he too went through the confusion cycle to know exactly what he was passionate about. He said that experimenting different fields, was the only way to figure out what he truly liked. He figured out that he had no interest in computer programming in his ninth grade itself as he hated writing them. He thought his passion lay in being a physicist or a mathematician, but he realized soon at the end of his freshmen year at college that he was not up for it as well. The one thing that Ballmer enjoyed doing was being the football manager for the college football team. Organizing things was what the job demanded and that is where Ballmer found his passion. And last but not least, Ballmer said "be tenacious. I actually prefer the word irrepressible.Irrepressible is kind of tenacious, but with optimism. You keep going and going. You could say, isn't that the same as passion. It's not. Passion is the ability to get excited about something. Irrepressibility and tenacity is about the ability to stay with it. If you take a look at all of the companies that have been started in our business, most of them fail. If you take even a look at the companies that have succeeded, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name it, all of these companies went through times of hardship. You get some success. You run into some walls. You try a formula for a new idea, a new innovation, it doesn't work. And it's how tenacious you are, how irrepressible, how ultimately optimistic and tenacious you are about it that will determine your success." Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980, and became Microsoft's 30th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates. Ballmer loved working at Microsoft.He was initially offered a salary of $50,000 as well as a percentage of ownership of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the company. He has headed several divisions within Microsoft including "Operating Systems Development", "Operations", and "Sales and Support." In January 2000, he was officially named Chief Executive Officer.

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