Analyzing Personality Trait of Bill Gates
Topic: Bill Gates
Following your introduction, and based on your proposal and feedback, develop a sufficiently detailed and supported, personality profile of your selected leader which will include at least two personality approaches covered in the class readings and discussions. The support for your choices must come from published speeches or statements by the your leadership choice, and actual events or incidents from his life – or her if you choose someone other than a male leader.
The examples may come from secondary sources, and you should have some corroboration of ideas from credible secondary sources that support your choices and your evaluation. I don’t want to read your interpretation of another’s evaluation. J
Let me iterate, avoid – as in don’t do it – using a secondary source to develop your personality choice. That is don’t look up Obama MBTI, or Putin Myers-Briggs in Google and use someone else’s analysis. There is no right or wrong answer here, per se. It is how well you support your choice that is important, not whether I or someone else may agree or disagree. But academically, being able to show occasional corroboration for key points is relevant.
Optional: Based on your assessment predict what your leader might do, or how he or she might react to a specific hypothetical situation.
How many sources should I review?
This is a common question asked by students. Essentially the key to an excellent research paper is the research that helps back up its arguments. While this might be an unsatisfactory answer for those in need of a clear "magic number" a few additional observations can be made. Students writing a course paper 15-20 pages in length should expect to cite 15-30 peer-reviewed sources within their papers, though in order to get to this point they should expect to read 25-50 peer-reviewed sources. For this assignment your literature review should reference 10-15 or more scholarly sources.
Format: Your literature review should include a title page, body, and reference page. Your paper should have 1-inch borders on all four sides, use times new roman-12 point font, be double spaced, and not have an extra space in between paragraphs. (You may need to turn this off in MS word by going to paragraph and clicking "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style). Since this is an INTL course you need to use the Chicago parenthetical citation style with a references page.
Introduction
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, is often described in the tech world as a "genius" who moved forward the "microcomputer revolution" in the 1970s and the 80s. Today, he is among the top five wealthiest people globally. As described by himself and many others, Gates is a “passionate character” with an ability to predict a change in the future and act with power and influence to make his mark on the industry and society (Reiche et al. 2017). Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and incorporated it no later than 1981. Since, Microsoft has climbed up the stairs of success and become one of the biggest companies in the world, whose stock price stands at $284.91 as of 31 July 2021 (MarketWatch 2021). This stock price of the company has seen a rise of 391.56% in the last five years. One might look at these figures and wonder who is driving all this success and making all this happen. Throughout these years in which Microsoft has seen great success, the influence of Gates has been profound, and he has held several positions in the company, i.e., Chairman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), President, and Chief Software Architect. Gates has remained grounded in the notion that "change is just around the corner” (Lunenburg 2012). With this belief in mind, Gates has been able to influence not just the tech industry but multiple people, including his contemporaries such as Steve Jobs (the co-founder of Apple Inc.), Larry Page (the co-founder of Google), and Warren Buffet, with whom he also enjoys a good friendship.
One might be interested in the specific personality traits that have enabled Gates to produce such a level of success in his field. This paper aims to dissect and analyze the different dynamics of Gates' personality and sketch his personality profile in the light of evidence from his statements and life events.
Bill Gates’ Personality Type
Two personality approaches are used in this paper to analyze and evaluate Gates' personality. The first one is the "social cognition approach." In this approach, the focus is on how the person under observation stores, processes, and applies the available information to him about the other people and social situations in his practical life as a decision-maker. On the other hand, the second approach is the "trait approach." In this approach, the focus is on the person's specific traits, and it is settled that these traits of that individual are the best indicators of his personality (Chatzipanagiotou et al. 2019).
In this section, the paper applies the social cognition approach. Myers-Briggs developed Sixteen different personality types, pointing to different ways of storing, processing, and using the available information. In the sixteen personality types, there are four dichotomies: Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I), Sensing (S) and Intuition (I), Judging (J), and Feeling (F). One who wants to analyze a personality can look at the examples from that person's life, judge which of these attributes the person is showing, and call his personality accordingly (Čirjevskis 2019). Hence, a four-letter personality code or type is developed, like ISTJ (Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging), which would mean that the person is an introvert, relies on the information received through his five senses, is a thinker in most practical situations, and is always judging his surroundings and other people. Typically, it is an ideal personality type for the crime detectives, as they look to sense and judge their surroundings for evidence and have little time to be sentimental about anything (Lunenburg 2012).
In the following paragraphs, this paper looks at different examples from the life of Bill Gates and makes a point over his most suitable personality type.
Growing Up – The Early Years of Bill Gates
Gates was born to a Seattle family in 1955. His father was a lawyer, and the mother a banker. It was his father's wish to make him a lawyer too. However, Gates developed at his own pace. In his early years in school, mainly playing sports, Gates would often get bullied by many students much taller and muscular than him. He would be called names for his appearance, amongst other inappropriate things. Right from this time, Gates developed a fondness for learning and developing, unlike his other class fellows in the Lakeside School (Gates 2013).
This attitude of learning and growing almost isolated him from the rest of the world (Reiche et al. 2017). Gates' mother often complained about him spending hours just reading different books. Then, at the age of 13, Gates wrote his first computer software program. It was a "tic-tac-toe" game in which the players could play against the computer. Gates was genuinely fascinated by this and how a computer code could generate that much intelligence. Such and other pursuits continued for Gates in the 1960s, when his only friend was Paul Allen, who would later co-found Microsoft. Paul was also Bill's classmate, and together they developed insights about the developing computer chip industry, which they believed would get far more significant than what was anticipated at the time by the members of the Silicon Valley (Gates 2013). "One reason I am so grateful to Lakeside is that I can directly trace the founding of Microsoft back to my earliest days here,” Gates recalled when delivering a speech in his high school in 2003 (Raelin 2005, 21). All of this happened while Gates was not an extrovert and only had one friend in Paul. All introverts are characterized by their avoidance of facing social crowds and their inner desire to express themselves in some other way. For Gates, this way of expression was designing the computer software (Lunenburg 2012).
Hence, fundamentally, Gates is an introvert who wants to pursue his desires and passions within a closed circle of influence. As Microsoft has developed and Gates has gotten more involved with philanthropic work, he has had to be more expressive about his opinions over the significant world challenges and the required approaches to mitigate those challenges, such as health and climate change (Lunenburg 2012). However, his strategy of "think weeks," whereby he goes to a remote place to essentially realign his ideas and develop new ambitions every year, suggests that he still carries an introverted personality (Gates 2013).
Dropping Out from Harvard and Launching Microsoft
It takes a person's intuition to teach him the value of an opportunity (Crawford et al. 2000). It certainly was the case when Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in 1975 and pursue what was at the time a new and highly growing industry in the shape of microcomputers. Gates, who had always been an introvert, felt that he could not miss out on this opportunity; hence, he decided to go...