Melinda Gates shares lessons from trying to change the world

Bill and Melinda Gates are no strangers to setting lofty goals.

In 2000, the Microsoft executives established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve health care and education and end hunger around the world.

Melinda Gates discussed the challenges and successes the foundation has faced since during the Global Leadership Summit Thursday at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington.

"We're working on the problems that are the hardest in society; we're working on what society has left behind because they are so hard," Gates said. "But Bill and I feel that if you bring business principles to them, and you bring your values to them, we're seeing progress, and that's why we keep at it."

Willow Creek Senior Pastor Bill Hybels interviewed Gates for the summit, which aims to share lessons from prominent leaders in all walks of life. A packed crowd of about 8,500 listened in the Willow Creek auditorium, while an estimated 305,000 more watched from satellite locations across the country.

In addition to the billions of dollars donated by the Gates family, the foundation has received more than a billion dollars from other philanthropists, and a commitment of $30 billion from Warren Buffett.

"We want to give this money away very, very responsibly, because I don't want to ask you, Bill, to put down $100 if I can't tell you that it is going to be spent well," Gates told Hybels. "And my Bill and I are calling on governments and asking them to put billions of dollars behind projects that we're also putting money behind. I can't do that unless I can show them that their money is going to actually make a difference."

Gates said when she and Bill started the foundation, they were surprised to find that unlike in the business world, many nonprofits made high-level decisions with little to no data to go on.

"If we put out a good product (at Microsoft), we knew immediately because we got customer feedback, we could see in the sales numbers," she said. "We said there must be ways that we can build data systems that understand what people want and what they are asking us for and what they need, and give us more robust feedback very quickly."

And so they created an elaborate, worldwide system to do that. As an example of how the network works, Gates said she gets a weekly report that shows exactly where the cases of polio are in the world, down to the sewer the disease breeds in, so they can send a vaccination team to address it.

Gates' interview was a highlight of the first day of the two-day summit, which also featured Alan Mulally, former president and CEO of The Ford Motor Co., among several other prominent business and religious leaders. The summit will be recorded, translated into 59 languages and disseminated to 675 sites in 125 countries throughout the fall.

Gates said she and her husband believe all lives have equal value and they are making progress bringing that philosophy to the world.

"The world is getting better, despite the headlines that you see that are very negative," she said. "Poverty has been cut in half in the last 25 years. Since 1990, childhood deaths are down by half, maternal deaths are down by almost half. So that makes me optimistic. It means that we are changing the world. But I'm impatient."