A Dedication to Remember

Bill Gates speaks to students, public at Concordia College business school dedication

BY KRIS BEVILL

Anticipation was high on April 27 as nearly 4,000 people buzzed about the campus of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., awaiting a question-and-answer session with Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. Outside the auditorium, ticket holders milled about, soaking up the sun on one of the first 70-degree days of the spring before heading through tight security at the building’s entrance and making their way to their seats. All of the auditorium’s 3,800 seats were spoken for, filled with students from Concordia, Moorhead State University at Moorhead, North Dakota State University and the University of North Dakota, Concordia faculty and staff and quick-thinking citizens who were able to snap up complimentary tickets in their short time frame of availability. Hundreds of others watched the event via live stream at various locations.

Gates was on campus as part of a daylong dedication event for the newly renovated Grant Center, home of the Offutt School of Business. The school’s namesake, Ron Offutt, chairman and CEO of R.D. Offutt Co. and RDO Equipment Co., is a Concordia alumnus and provided a substantial donation for the $16.2 million project, which included the addition of a new story to the Grant Center and the installation of environmentally friendly features to qualify the building for LEED

(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification. The project also included the construction of a 200-seat auditorium, named the Barry Auditorium in honor of alumnus D. John Barry, founder and chairman of MidAmerica Capital Partners.

Concordia’s business program is liberal arts-based and focuses on global understanding, entrepreneurship, ethics and leadership, fundamentals which dove-tail well with Gates’ history of leadership, innovation and a philanthropic focus on global issues with a goal of improving lives around the world. In his introductory remarks, Offutt said the dedication event was an “epic” day for him and for the college. “[Gates’] creativity has opened doors to the world,” he said, adding that it would now open the doors to the Offutt School of Business.

Prolonged applause welcomed Gates to the stage, after which he addressed the crowd for about 10 minutes, offering a brief history of what he called his “two careers” — Microsoft and philanthropy. He noted that the two paths are different in that Microsoft focuses on selling software to people who can afford computers while philanthropy focuses on providing for those in need, but they also share a common underpinning. “At its core, it’s basically the same thing, which is finding innovators, be willing to back them, understand what they’re working on, measure what they’re coming up with, try to make sure that when it’s delivered it really has the impact it’s supposed to have, and getting into a feedback loop, driven by very precise measurement,” he said. “I feel like all of the things I learned at Microsoft really just prepared me, as well as providing the resources, to do the work that I do now.”

Gates commended Concordia for its efforts to send students out into the world as part of the higher education learning experience and said that being aware of global issues will help students better decide which area of work to pursue. He also noted the ability of technology to assist in providing richer learning experiences. “I envy kids growing up today,” he said. “When I was young, I had to read the World Book [Encyclopedias] alphabetically. It didn’t have any videos you could click on. It’s weird to learn things alphabetically. The empowerment now, the opportunity to see what’s going on, has never been so great.”

The first student to pose a question to Gates asked for his input on which global issues are the most critical for students to address. Gates settled on three: the economic divide between the rich and poor, energy and health care in the U.S. “We have a [health care] model in the United States that’s an unaffordable model,” he said, adding that determining solutions for each of those three complex issues will require “all of the ingenuity that all of you have.”

Several of the questions presented to Gates related to his dedication to philanthropy through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Concordia President William Craft, who joined Gates on stage for the duration of his 70-minute appearance, asked how the couple decides where to focus its funding efforts. Gates said he and Melinda determined that education is a key issue in the U.S. and therefore have dedicated about $1 billion each year, which amounts to one-quarter of the foundation’s annual philanthropic budget, toward improving education in America. The remaining threefourths of the foundation’s financial contributions are dedicated to helping improve the lives of poor people, often through the invention and distribution of vaccines. He said the cost of essentially saving a life through deploying those types of health care improvements is surprisingly low, often less than $1,500 per person, and yet prior to the Gates Foundation, many of those research areas were not being adequately funded. “That was kind of stunning to me,” he said. “I thought when I came to philanthropy that all of the really ‘good’ stuff, the really high impact stuff, somebody would have done and we would just get to do the next marginal thing. Unfortunately for the world, some of these great opportunities weren’t being worked on.”

As an example, he said that when the foundation contributed $40 million for malaria, it equaled just 10 percent of the amount that had been donated by others to research a cure for baldness. He also pointed out that the treatment for most types of worms in humans today is derived from a treatment developed in the U.S. for dogs. “Somebody just said, ‘Let’s try it on the humans in Africa,’ and it happened to work perfectly,” he said. “It was donated, which is a fantastic thing, but it never would have been created except for these rich dogs that needed to be de-wormed.”

The free market often overlooks worthy issues, such as malaria, because their consumers are poor and don’t have a voice in the marketplace, he said. Therefore, he believes philanthropy should be willing to take on those types of risky projects. “It has to pick things that the market won’t do for some reason and the government won’t do for some reason,” he said.

Philanthropic Connections

Concordia was able to obtain Gates as a speaker for the event through connections made via the college’s Global Leadership Council. Harold Hamm, CEO and chairman of Continental Resources and member of the council, introduced Gates at the event and said he came to know Gates through the Giving Pledge, a group comprised of billionaires who have publicly committed to giving away the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.

According to Gates, the idea of the Giving Pledge, which was developed by the Gateses and Warren Buffett, was to bring together people who were already doing philanthropy or thinking about doing philanthropy, so that they could share their knowledge on how best to contribute their wealth. He said the public pledge to commit the majority of one’s wealth ensures that Giving Pledge members have “some skin in the game” in terms of philanthropic contributions. Currently, 105 people are members of the group, which has recently been expanded to include billionaires outside of the U.S. who may be interested in joining. Gates said that while it’s hard to measure, he believes the Giving Pledge is having a positive impact and that it will continue to have an impact for generations.

Eye Toward Education

Regarding education reform, Gates noted that one of the key differences between countries that are doing well in K-12 education and the U.S. is a feedback system for teachers. “They invest in having other teachers sit in the classroom or training the principals,” he said. “They have career ladders where at an early stage as a teacher you are given a lot of guidance and if you achieve a certain level of skill you move up. Our system has fallen into a mode where teachers basically get no feedback. I think it’s important that we build that feedback system. Exactly how you do that, how much you connect that to the pay system … we need experimentation and we can look at these other countries that have done it.”

As for higher education, Gates said the largest issues facing the U.S. are the cost of higher education and student graduation rates. He cited technology as a possible solution to the current high costs of higher education. “There’s a lot of excitement about this,” he said. “There’s these massive online open courses (MOOCs) that various people are doing and our foundation is the biggest funder of those.” However, he added that it is not yet clear how online education can be best blended into brick-andmortar curriculums.

Gates’ vast knowledge of world issues was apparent throughout the event as he easily addressed questions relating to concerns over vaccine distribution in parts of the Middle East, agricultural education in India and China’s view toward personal wealth. He also displayed a rather unexpected sense of humor, responding to a question on the negative impacts of great wealth by saying, “As far as I can tell it’s had no negative effect on me.” He followed that statement with a display of humility, by noting that he believes any kind of success has the potential to be dangerous. “You can think that whatever your success was, [it] was because you were magically gifted in understanding things,” he said. “Whereas of course any success, particularly a gigantic success, is a huge number of factors, including hard work and understanding, but timing, other people who came to work with you, people who might have done the same thing but somehow messed up in doing it. Often you have too much confidence about what you understand.” PB

Kris Bevill Editor, Prairie Business 701-306-8561, kbevill@prairiebizmag.com