Bill Gates: the exit interview

What hap­pens when an influ­en­tial exec­u­tive leaves his company?

NFL com­mis­sioner Paul Tagli­abue thought he should just step away from decision-making when he retired in Sep­tem­ber 2006. It’s a good idea, but many founders and top exec­u­tives just can’t do it.

“I think gen­er­ally the best way to run an orga­ni­za­tion is for the per­son who is run­ning it to be in charge and for the peo­ple who had been run­ning it pre­vi­ously to dis­ap­pear.” — Paul Tagli­abue

Intel co-founder Andy Grove has kept his dis­tance form Intel, although he has writ­ten about the com­pany in sev­eral books, includ­ing the text­book for my IS 7010 course.

Engad­get gives us some clues about this process in an exit inter­view with Bill Gates. Gates has n ot left Microsoft yet, but he will step down from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft this July to focus on his phil­an­thropic work.

He will still work on some pet Microsoft projects. My favorite bit in the arti­cle is Gates’ admis­sion that he is never sat­is­fied with any Microsoft prod­uct. Can Bill let go in July?

Tagged as: book, ceo, football, Intel, management, Microsoft, retire