 |
 |
The December 2004 Business 2.0 magazine issue has a section on succeeding in 2005 where they conduct a brief interview with a number of movers that includes Bill Gates. The article is titled “How to Exploit Innovation” (full text online to B2 mag subscribers) with one of the questions being “Where do you find your inspiration?” Gates replied that for two weeks of the year he does nothing but read “literally hundreds of papers about advances in computing, business trends, and ideas from our researchers and developers.“
My 2-bit two thoughts on this are 1) I would like to see that reading list! and 2) for a coder like myself, making a point to spend a block of time every workday reading about technological and business trends as I've been doing recently (covered in my Nordic Track series) has helped me be a better developer, I think, because I am able to extend my thinking beyond the curly brackets of today's issues and think about my role and potential influence on the future. |