The Experience of Being Elsewhere

Tachi Yamada, M.D., is president of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Yamada discusses three areas and ideas that are important to consider and reflect on - -

The Critical Things - - Every day, I read about 1,000 pages of documents, whether grants or letters or scientific articles, or whatever. I have learned what the critical things to read are. If there are 10 tasks in an overall project, what it the most critical task? What is the one thing that everything else hinges on? I’ll spend a lot of time understanding that one thing. Then, when the problem occurs, it usually occurs there, and I can be on top of what the problem is.

Change - - You have to have people in an organization who are willing to embrace change, because if they don’t, what you have is an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at status quo. And, of course, that leads to stagnation. It’s also an unsustainable model. I’ve made an observation about people. There are people who have moved. Take somebody who’s a child of an Army officer - - they have moved 10 times in their lives. Then there are people who’ve been born and raised and educated and employed in one town their whole lives. Who do you think is willing to change? I think that in this modern world, you really have to be sure that your work force has the experience of being elsewhere. That experience then has the ability to ensure that you will be comfortable with change.

Relationships - - Intelligence is often displayed in what I would call complex abstract thinking, and there’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships. And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people.