Bill Gates says an essay collection from 1969 is the business book that helped him most in his career by Richard Feloni on Feb 27, 2017, 4:22 PM Advertisement
 When Bill Gates says a book changed his life, it's worth checking out. Three years ago, Gates had his favorite business book, 1969's "Business Adventures" by John Brooks, pulled out of obscurity and put back into print. With the force of Gates' passionate recommendation behind it, it became a bestseller. He continues to publicly vouch for it, most recently on Monday in a Reddit AMA, in response to the question, "Was there any book that helped you through your career?" On his personal blog, Gates said that he fell in love with the book, a collection of Brooks' New Yorker articles detailing some of the most important events in corporate America in the mid-20th century, back in 1991, when he was still CEO of Microsoft. He had asked Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett what his favorite business book was, and Buffett responded by sending Gates his personal copy of "Business Adventures." "Brooks's work is a great reminder that the rules for running a strong business and creating value haven't changed," Gates wrote in his post. We've gone through "Business Adventures" and highlighted some of its key lessons that are still applicable today: SEE ALSO: I spent 4 days in Arkansas for the 14,000-person Walmart shareholders meeting, and it's unlike anything else in the corporate world Innovators need to keep innovating  Gates wrote that one of the most instructive stories in the book, especially when taken in a historical context, is the article with his favorite title, "Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox." Brooks chronicled how Xerox recruited researchers to develop the product that would replace the mimeograph machine and change how offices worked around the world. Five years after the Xerox 914 hit the mass market in 1960, "xeroxing" was part of pop culture and the company brought in $500 million in revenue. But beyond Brooks' account, Xerox's leadership had grown comfortable with its early success. This attitude would eventually lead to huge losses in the late 1970s as competitors started releasing their own photocopiers. Gates believed this could have been avoided by Xerox executives embracing, rather than ignoring, the advances Xerox made with graphical user interfaces. They did not turn it into a marketable technology because they believed it didn't fit into their legacy, but companies like Apple and Microsoft built on this tech to great success. "I know I'm not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox's part," Gates wrote. "I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft. I pushed hard to make sure that we kept thinking big about the opportunities created by our research in areas like computer vision and speech recognition."
Place extra resources into what matters for long-term success Xerox's founding is important to look at, as well. Joseph C. Wilson, the company's founder, inherited The Haloid Photographic Company in the late 1940s. After learning of the physicist Chester Carlson's invention of an electronic printing machine, he made an agreement with Carlson and decided that his company's future was in finding a way to turn the experiment into an easy-to-use office tool. Wilson took the new name of this copying process, xerography, and renamed his company Haloid Xerox in 1958, while the xerography machine was still in development. Wilson's board grew anxious as he insisted on the years of R&D the machine required, and Brooks explains that even the researchers weren't convinced they could create a marketable product. Wilson could have given customers a cumbersome product, but it likely would have bombed and then later improved upon by a competitor. But $75 million later, the Xerox 914 made Wilson and his executive team rich and Xerox a household name.
Business can be done with social purposes  Brooks expressed fascination with Wilson's do-gooder rhetoric, concluding that it was genuine. Today, many companies hype their compassionate corporate cultures, but it was less common in the 1960s. Wilson believed that it was his duty to donate millions of dollars to charities and universities and to have progressive hiring policies during the civil rights movement. Wilson's unorthodox ideas initially faced pushback, and then, along with similar initiatives, were torn apart in the 1970s by the Nobel Prize-winning-economist Milton Friedman, who advocated for placing utmost primacy on shareholders, not society. In the post-Great Recession world, however, Wilson's ideals of investing resources into employees and society are now fundamentally seen as beneficial for business performance, and thus good for shareholders, too.
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