1、President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates: Ive been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you Id come back and get my degree
2、.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. Ill be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume. I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, Im just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvards
3、 most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class I did the best of everyone who failed. But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. Im a bad influence. Thats why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If
4、I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today. Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadnt even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always
5、 lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didnt worry about getting up in the morning. Thats how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people. Radcliffe was a gr
6、eat place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesnt guarantee success. One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in
7、 January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the worlds first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “Were not quite ready, c
8、ome see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadnt written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft. What I remember above all abou
9、t Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I wor
10、ked on. But taking a serious look back I do have one big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about new
11、ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanitys greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad
12、economic opportunity reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in develop
13、ing countries. It took me decades to find out. You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the worlds inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope youve had a chance to think about how in this age of accelerating technology we can finally take o
14、n these inequities, and we can solve them. Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend
15、 it? For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have. During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that
16、 we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year none of them in the United States. We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children wer
17、e dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just werent being delivered. If you believe that every life has equal value, its revolting t
18、o learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This cant be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.” So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?” Th
19、e answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system. But you and I have both. We can make market forces wo
20、rk better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpa
21、yer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-en
22、ded. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world. I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end because people just
23、 dont care.” I completely disagree. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing not because we didnt care, but because we didnt know what to do. If we had know
24、n how to help, we would have acted. The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps. Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is
25、 still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future. But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of al
26、l the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. Were determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.” The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of pre
27、ventable deaths. We dont read much about these deaths. The media covers whats new and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where its easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, its difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. Its hard to look at su
28、ffering if the situation is so complex that we dont know how to help. And so we look away. If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution. Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring.
29、 If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares and that makes it hard for their
30、 caring to matter. Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have whe
31、ther its something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet. The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single d
32、ose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior. Pursuing that goal st
33、arts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century which is to surrender to complexity and quit. The final step after seeing the problem and finding an approach is to
34、measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts. You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government. But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the
