It was more than 30 years ago when Chris Williams first found himself in the room with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
The man—who a matter of years later was named the richest person on earth—had just purchased Fox Software, a producer of database management systems, for $170 million.
In 1992 Williams, who had worked at Fox Software as a developer and director of marketing, was one of a handful invited to Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash., to meet with Gates and discuss the business he had just bought.
Speaking on LinkedIn, Williams remembered how Gates had little time for pleasantries with the six newcomers in their initial meeting: He wanted to “see what he’d bought.”
The aim of the meeting, Williams said it became apparent, was for Gates to understand how the product he had purchased—Fox Pro—worked faster than existing Microsoft rival, Cirrus.
Gates quickly identified the individual responsible for the speed of Fox Pro, with Williams describing the ensuing back-and-forth as resembling “a Star Trek mind meld.”
Get to the details
Gates fired question after question at the engineer before him, Williams said, getting to such a level of detail that they discussed the movement of single bits and the size of the Intel 80386 instruction cache.
It was only then that Gates seemed satisfied, bringing the meeting to an end.
“In the years that passed, I saw Bill do this same kind of exercise time and again,” Williams said.
“He was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail. As a younger man this drilling was aggressive and harsh. As he got older, his passion for detail never left, just his method for getting there mellowed.”
‘Smell the odor’
According to Williams, Gates isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
The man worth $125 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is known for speaking his mind—often sharing his thoughts on his website, Gates Notes.
This year alone the tech titan has shut down a proposal to temporarily ban the development of advanced large language models like ChatGPT, saying the plan wouldn’t solve any of the issues the public is now facing because of the technology.
Similarly, Gates didn’t mince words as the CEO of Microsoft, a position he held from 1972 to 2000.
“It seems that Bill learned early on that pressing for details until failure, resulted in two kinds of responses,” Williams revealed. “There were the people who were strong enough to admit, in the face of the then richest man on the planet…‘I don’t know.’ And there were those who just started making things up. Guessing at answers.”
Gates would apparently swear and call out such answers as the “stupidest thing [he’d] ever heard.”
And this ability—as Williams put it—to “smell the odor of falsehood” only got better with age.
Williams, who is six months older than the famed philanthropist, added: “Later you could tell you were in trouble just from his facial expressions. That look of disappointment that told you, ‘Oops, perhaps I should retreat here.’”
Having been promoted from roles like development manager and director of product development to vice president of human resources, Williams claims he spent a lot of time one-on-one with Gates, and picked up some of his skills by osmosis.
The HR VP turned leadership coach said: “It was hard to be in those rooms many times and not pick up some of that skill. I began to see the same kinds of signs. I learned to watch for the flittering eyes, the unsure tone, or the smell of desperation.”
Get to the point
Having left Microsoft in 2000, Williams said one major lesson still stands out to him: Cut through the noise and get to the crux of the issue.
It was a skill Gates wielded with ease, he said, and at first Williams believed staff agreeing with their boss was merely to placate him.
“A team would bring in a deeply complex set of issues,” Williams explained. “They would have miles of data and dozens of opinions on the correct path. They would say, ‘We’re struggling to decide if we should do X and build this, or head toward Y and build that.’
“Within seconds Bill had absorbed it all. Somehow, someway, he found the two or three variables that mattered. He would blurt out, ‘Don’t you see, this and that are what matters, it’s so clear you should do X.’”
The whole room would fall silent, Williams said, while people realized Gates was right.
Having seen the phenomenon a few times, and after seeing more of Microsoft’s culture, Williams said he realized that other senior managers would call Gates out if they disagreed with his thinking.
This rarely happened, Williams points out, as Gates was “virtually always right.”
