Interesting interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s Global Health Program:
On management:
bq. Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today — I don’t micromanage, but I have microinterest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.
On learning:
bq. you can’t possibly be competitive in the world unless you actually go outside your own geography and learn the way other people live and think. That probably was the most important lesson I learned — that what’s out there is more important than what you already know, and that you’d better go out and learn what it is out there that you don’t know.
On meetings:
bq. when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.
The whole interview with Tachi Yamada.