I have always been an observer of Bill Gates. He is a unique combination of nerdiness,
smarts, innovation, commitment and effectiveness. I think
it is the blending of these traits that has made him so successful as a leader
in business, technology and philanthropy.
He has brought something much more important than money to philanthropy
he has brought his genius and discipline in knowing how to get things done
right.
 |
| Getting a closer look at charts documenting rural health progress at the Germana Gale Health Post in Ethiopia. Over the past year I’ve been impressed with progress in using data and measurement to improve the human condition (Dalocha, Ethiopia, 2012). |
In the last year Beth Kanter has
been talking about the importance of measurement to the networked
nonprofit. Now Bill Gates opens his 2013
Annual letter talking about it with a quote from William Rosen’s “The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Bill writes: “Without feedback from
precise measurement, Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and
erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."……..But in
the past year I have been struck again and again by how important measurement
is to improving the human condition. You can achieve amazing progress if you
set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that
goal-in a feedback loop similar to the one Rosen describes. This may seem
pretty basic, but it is amazing to me how often it is not done and how hard it
is to get right.
In previous annual letters,
I've focused a lot on the power of innovation to reduce hunger, poverty, and
disease. But any innovation-whether it's a new vaccine or an improved
seed-can't have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from
it. That's why in this year's letter I discuss how innovations in measurement
are critical to finding new, effective ways to deliver these tools and services
to the clinics, family farms, and classrooms that need them.”
Measurement is officially the
new black and you will hear even more about it this year so it is time to get
on board. In my 30 year career in the communications technology business, I
learned the importance of measurement as a key element of our quality
program. I found that just by having a
measurement posted, it motivated people to see it as important and do what they
could to improve it. And celebrating the
contributions to the success of all and being able to measure that success adds
fuel to the fire for future successes.
These are lessons that nonprofits are ready for.
Now back to more of what
Bill Gates has to say. I particularly identify
and agree with this, “Given a goal, you
decide on what key variable you need to change to achieve it-the same way a
business picks objectives for inside the company like customer satisfaction-and
develop a plan for change and a way of measuring the change. You use the
measurement as feedback to make adjustments. I think a lot of efforts fail
because they don't focus on the right measure or they don't invest enough in
doing it accurately.” Bill Gates goes on
to use the example of how UNICEF set of a goal of reaching 80% of the world’s
children with lifesaving immunizations and how they used measurements to
identify progress and setbacks and make adjustments. Too often nonprofits think that measurement
is just about reporting successes to foundations. Measurement needs to be about how you can
determine what is working, what is not and what adjustments you need to
make. Foundations need to learn this
lesson too.
Eradication of polio
remains a top goal for Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Bill always talks about this goal passionately. The number of polio cases globally has
dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to less than 500 last year and on of the last bastions, India, has been
polio free since 2011. The goal remains
to be zero – total eradication and the steps being taken are truly
impressive. Bill identifies Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan as the three places where polio persists. In Nigeria they invested n an independent
detailed quality assessment and learned this.
The hand drawn local maps that were prepared were inaccurate for
distances and did not include all village settlements so field polio
vaccination workers were missing whole settlements and did not get to all the
settlements they were assigned. They are
now using satellite maps to locate all settlements and equipping field workers
with GPS which records the locations they visited. They have incorporated measuring results,
quality assessments and technology enabled actions along with on the ground
vaccinating one child at a time techniques.
I’m impressed. Bill goes on to
acknowledge as heroes the nine polio vaccinators who were killed in Pakistan
and notes that Pakistan and Afghanistan present difficult obstacles for this
goal.
Bill also talks about the Millennium Development goals and
the progress made towards them. He is
proud of the Gates Foundation commitment and contribution to them and concerned
that new goals being developed for 2015 and beyond may not have the same
universal support. His letter is a call
to caution here and I do agree with him that for these goals to continue to have
universal commitment, they need to not be controversial.
Millennium Development Goals
Bill always includes a
section on the Gates Foundation involvement in the United States and this year
he discusses Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET a program funded since
2009. They worked with 3,000 classroom teachers to better understand how to build an evaluation and
feedback system to help
teachers improve. They have just announced the final results of
the MET project and the report concluded that there were observable, repeatable, and verifiable ways of measuring
teacher effectiveness. MET highlighted several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance
including student surveys and reports from trained evaluators who observe
teachers at work. He reports on the
results and teacher acceptance of the program versus the test results only
measurements so frequently touted.
I strongly suggest that you read the whole
annual letter. Bill does an excellent job of blending objective analysis with personal
storytelling and it is a great read. You
can download it here:
http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/2013.aspx?cid=fb__GF#nav=intro
No comments:
Post a Comment