There is no doubt that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most influential philanthropies in the world. Despite co-founder Melinda French Gates’s resignation and a new $1 billion pledge to initiatives supporting women, girls, and reproductive rights, there’s a lot to learn from her leading role in the foundation.
In April, Yahoo Finance sat down with Patty Stonesifer, French Gates’ friend, mentor, and founding CEO of the Gates Foundation, who also once served as interim CEO of the Washington Post.
French Gates and Stonesifer met at Microsoft (). Reflecting back on their days at the tech company, Stonesifer said she and French Gates leaned on each other in the face of the company’s male-dominated leadership.
When asked to join the Gates Foundation, Stonesifer said the opportunity was “just irresistible.”
To see the full Lead This Way episode, click .
Video Transcript
Melinda French Gates recently announced her resignation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a new $1 billion pledge to initiatives supporting women, girls and reproductive rights.
Yahoo Finance sat down with Melinda’s friend, mentor and founding CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Patty stonecipher to reflect on French gates’ career and leadership from her time at Microsoft and the foundation to now in those early days, Patty, what what impressed you about Melinda?
Well, you can’t be around Melinda very much without realizing that she has a great deal of personal discipline and she really uh from the get go just kind of showed that personal discipline and application of all that she had learned and all that she knew to the whatever the challenge was at hand, she also had a of that wonderful Southern uh smile and attitude of warmth that came through right away and was a little bit too rare in the tech industry at that time.
How did you go about becoming her mentor?
So I think it was really just about proximity, we became friendly colleagues and then dear friends.
Uh and there was a group of women at Microsoft, that kind of held together to try to reinforce each other in what was in fact a, you know, a largely male leadership environment.
So that kind of both friendship but also co mentorship.
I learned a great deal from each one of them, including a great deal from Melinda.
Melinda comes to you Patty and says, uh hey, I’m creating this foundation.
What is that like, what Melinda saw and what Bill saw as their responsibility uh to take the resources that they had and really try to close the gap between what they believed and valued and what was being valued and acted upon in the rest of the world was such an exciting vision and the opportunity to work with her and him again in that way.
But in a whole uh in a whole different environment, it was just irresistible.
So I just said, yes, right away.
It, it didn’t matter to me that it was uh flipping the model a bit and I would be working for Melinda, which I then did for the next decade.
There’s a lot of res resources behind the foundation.
It’s good to have that, of course, but to build a team and to drive impact to your point, it requires the right people on the team.
You know, how did Melinda and then of course, um Bill, how did they go upon building their team and setting that team up for success?
Well, they were great partners to me and Melinda was uh front of the line on that because she really was my day to day uh partner.
Uh while Bill had more than his hands full at Microsoft in many ways to build kind of a, a absolute dream team.
Uh We went after people that were so much better than us and knew so much about the fields, but also were wise and were thinking of how to be great ancestors um as opposed to thinking about how to build their career.
But thinking about how to use the resources and the opportunity and these blank sheets of paper where we could say, what do we want to do about health?
What should we do about us education?
What might we do about early child?
Melinda just stood with me and helped assure people that their ideas, their insights, their strategies uh would shape the future of this foundation.
And that was such a compelling opportunity that um honestly, I’ve never been able to put together a team like that team at the Gates Foundation and it was extraordinary and Melinda’s real deep listening learning and consideration of, of nuance was critical to having superstars from every field.
Want to help the Gates Foundation be successful.
You’ve essentially watched uh Melinda grow up as a person, as a leader.
What, what do you think her legacy will be, her first uh legacy will be, you know, the people that walked taller uh because she was instrumental in their lives.
And that’ll start with, I’m sure her kids, but it will include a lot of us who worked alongside of her and got to do more, achieve more.
And then for her that that circle gets wider and wider uh from the uh from the decision, strategic decisions and allocation of resources that she made in a way that made leaders in many fields with many and missions, be able to walk taller, achieve more, be bolder in their vision of the future.
And you know, if you get a chance to have two or three people around you who achieve more on this uh in this limited time, we have on this planet because of your uh work with them.
That’s a real gift.
That number for her is tens of thousands and millions of people who are achieving their own potential in a, in a, in a bigger way at a bigger scale because of the vision that she had and that the um that the foundation and pivotal had, but also the resources and the way that the resources were given to them, to achieve the their own capacity to change the world.