INITIATIVE AND LEADERSHIP 321out for advertising, my department and my course in advertising and
salesmanship become my own and I may have the privilege of separating
this department from your school and running it under my own name.
The plan was agreeable and the contract was closed.
(Please keep in mind that my difinite purpose was to secure the use
of $25,000 for which I had no security to offer.)
COMMENTARY
A powerful example of initiative can be found in one the greatest modern success
stories: the founding of Microsoft by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Gates and Allen became friends in high school. They were early examples of
the now-familiar computer nerd, people so obsessed with programming that they
seemed to think of little else.
In 1974, Gates was attending Harvard while Allen was working for Honeywell
and also living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was there that they began to exhibit
the initiative that would guide their careers. An issue of Popular Electronics maga-
zine had a cover article on a new computer, the Altair 8800, a $400 device that
was the first computer meant for the general public.
Today the Altair would seem very primitive. It had no keyboard and was
designed to be connected to a teletype. But Gates and Allen knew that it would
be tremendously appealing if someone wrote a simple version of the programming
language BASIC to give the Altair instructions.
For two months they worked on writing BASIC language for the Altair-
though they didn't even own one of the machines-and then contacted Ed Roberts,
the engineer who had designed the Altair.
Their version of BASIC worked, and Roberts was so impressed that he offered
Gates and Allen a contract. By the summer, Gates and Allen had formed a company
they called Microsoft, which earned royalties on every Altair sold with their language.
Soon they were adapting other programming languages for the Altair.
Sometimes it seems that when anyone wants to make a point about any
aspect of success they cite Bill Gates and the founding of Microsoft. So what is
the point of the story in the context of initiative?