Barians Led by Bill Gates: Research Paper

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It is clear that the authors have an axe to grind -- Edstrom is the daughter of a once-prominent Microsoft executive, Pen was booted from Microsoft after his work on a project proved unsuccessful. But perhaps the main reason the book seems like 'scorekeeping' is that the first and primary 'lesson' to be learned from the book, according to the authors is the seeming virtue of luck. Over and over, it is stressed that Gates was not necessarily the only person to come up with the ideas behind modern personal computing, even while they grant he was often technologically insightful. Market circumstances more than managing genius favored his company. Microsoft triumphed, but this was not necessarily by design. Microsoft is an intensely factional company, and often only after certain key power-players within the firm were able to advocate for the importance of the Internet was Microsoft able to gain a late advantage, with its introduction of Internet Explorer. The creation of the major features of the Windows operating system was similarly accidental and only arose after much corporate in-fighting.

However, it is possible to learn from this organizational diffusion and autonomy, at least in a technological company -- this organizational model allows a certain amount of creativity to flourish, along with infighting.

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Creativity generates mistakes just as much as it does genius, and perhaps a more tightly organized company would not have been as successful. A second lesson is that Gates' leadership was not always flexible, but it was responsive enough to recognize when mistakes had been made, and to change when change was needed -- before it was too late. And finally, another lesson is the value of PR -- according to the authors Microsoft often created buzz about products that were really only in their nascent stages -- 'vaporware' they call it, and even the Department of Justice lawsuit did not fundamentally tarnish the company's image enough to undercut sales.

Perhaps the moral of the Microsoft Corporation is similar to that of other American icons, such as McDonald's and Wal-Mart -- if a product or service can be created that comes to seem ubiquitous, no matter how flawed the planning, the execution, or even the ethics of the company's business model, it its difficult to impinge upon the product's profitability. Yet the emphasis on happenstance in this model means that it is difficult to replicate, for the ordinary businessperson on a small scale -- how can….....

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