"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 magna cum laude 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 Ballmer was doing an MBA program. A friend of his who he had gone to college with Bill Gates, offered him to drop out of school and join him for his venture. When Ballmer explained this to his father, his father had no clue of what a software was neither was his mother, who ended up asking him why would a person ever need a computer?
As Albert Einstein once said "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination," Microsoft proved the statement with two people's daring imagination, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Microsoft was the result of one single good idea that was never thought before. Ballmer explains that it was one fundamental idea by two individuals, which has ended up with every home having a computer. He said that a microprocessor is some form of free intelligence which when combined with right software will form a computer for every home.
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 he was under a lot confusion to find out what he truly liked to do. He tested his likes and dislike when he was in the ninth grade and he had to write a computer program. He hated it and though he was never qualified for computer programming. When went on to do his college he thought he would be a physicist or a mathematician, but at the end of his freshmen year he had realized that he had too little patience for those.
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 realized that he passionately liked his job. When Ballmer was looking out for a change in his career, jobs from movie business came knocking at his door. Then by luck, Bill Gates asked him to join his 30 member team and since then there has been looking back.
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.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave the commencement speech at the University of Southern California.
Thanks & Regards,
S.Grace Paul Regan
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