During this session of the 2007 Global Philanthropists Circle Annual Meeting, William H. Gates Sr., Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discussed with Peggy Dulany, Founder and Chair of The Synergos Institute, why the Gates Foundation and Synergos have each choose to work with other organizations and how partnerships have played a role in their work around the world.
| Main Speakers: | William H. Gates Sr., Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Peggy Dulany, GPC Member, Founder and Chair, The Synergos Institute |
"As with so many of you, we're working on things we don't understand at all, and there wouldn't be any hope for our getting anything done, really, unless we involved others in the world...we are trying to change existing conditions in a foreign place, and there isn't the slightest possibility that we would make any progress, except by gathering into the fold a partner or partners who are knowledgeable."PEGGY DULANY: Good morning, everybody. For those of you who I haven't met, I'm Peggy Dulany, and it's my great pleasure to be here with all of you and to have a chance to have this conversation with Bill Gates, Sr. Maybe I could just set the stage by saying a few words that will be familiar to many of you, because you have the same approach about Synergos' orientation towards partnership. As you know, we were formed with the notion of stimulating partnerships, inclusive partnerships that would include those most affected by the problems to reduce poverty and decrease inequities around the world. Synergos, in fact, means "working together," coming from the Greek word.
So, over the years, we've taken a variety of strategies for addressing that. We've just completed a new strategic plan, which, once again, puts partnership to reduce poverty in the center of our activities. And our emphasis has always been very much in convening different groups of stakeholders around some of the current problems that face the world, hoping that with and through our partners, we can model an approach that will then expand and extend more broadly, because it is our belief that problems will not get solved by one group alone.
So that sets the stage of where Synergos is coming from, and we were so pleased that Bill accepted our invitation to be with us and have this conversation, because, as I'm sure you know from the extensive press coverage that the Gates Foundation gets, their orientation is very much one of partnership. So we're going to just spend a few minutes having a conversation between the two of us and then open the floor to all of you, because I'm sure you'll be very curious with your own questions.
So, what I'd like to begin with is the somewhat obvious question that the Gates Foundation, as the largest foundation in the world, I think it has a $35 billion endowment and has already applied $13.6 billion in grants. Why would you need partnership? What would be your motivation for wanting to work with other groups, rather than simply deciding and applying the funds yourself?
BILL GATES, SR: Well, as with so many of you, we're working on things we don't understand at all, and there wouldn't be any hope for our getting anything done, really, unless we involved others in the work. Particularly in the area of global health, we're talking about activities in places with rules that we don't understand and traditions that we don't understand. And like many of the projects that you all are involved in, we are trying to change existing conditions in a foreign place, and there isn't the slightest possibility that we would make any progress, except by gathering into the fold a partner or partners who are knowledgeable. So it's principally a matter of ability to function, of knowledge. There are, of course, those cases where it's a function of resources. We don't have enough resources to begin to deal with the problems, and we need folks with resources to join ours in order to accomplish something. Those two considerations lead us to spending a lot of time working with other people on the projects that we're committed to.
DULANY: And maybe you can give us a sense of the range of your partners, and maybe even an example of one area where you worked with a range of different partners. Are you talking about scientists, grassroots communities? You've already mentioned other philanthropists, governments.
GATES, SR: Well perhaps the most advanced and broad-based partnerships that we're involved in would be the vaccine delivery work by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. It started as an idea, basically in my son's living room some years ago. We gathered a group of people who had been involved in the earlier efforts to maximize vaccination around the world, an effort which was sort of diminishing in its energy. And, from that, there were people gathered and meetings occurred, and we ended up with a really fairly complicated organization, in which the management is vested in the units of the United Nations. There's a Board, and people on the Board from a variety of countries, which are donee countries. There's a wonderful management staff, and there is funding coming from at least a dozen different places and very large sums of money involved. So, that's really a large complicated collaboration. And, incidentally, it's been terribly successful. We've vaccinated millions of children, and there isn't any question that it is making some difference in terms of the disease-level in the places where that's been done. It's just exceptionally gratifying.
Now, another example, on a somewhat smaller scale, but also with very large objectives, is our partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to deal with agricultural problems, particularly in Africa, as a consequence of soliciting the Rockefeller people to let us join them, because as I think many of you know, they've been involved in the so-called "Green Revolution" for several decades and have accomplished wonderful things in a variety of places in the world. And again we needed somebody who knew something about what they were doing, and so we have a very distinct and discrete partnership with them, to create a thing called AGRA, which is an African agricultural improvement organization. They're headquartered in Nairobi, and it is a partnership in which, basically, funding is the shared ingredient, and, to a large extent, the expertise and the management the Rockefeller people have had over so many years and dealing with efforts to improve agriculture in African countries. Very ambitious.
DULANY: Yes. So going back to the first example you gave, it sounds as though what you were applying was not only the money to fund this, but really creating the organization through which it could happen, is that true?
GATES, SR.: That is true.
DULANY: And so this is an interesting point, because a lot of times I think we, as philanthropists, get pegged into the role of simply giving money, and I've always taken the position that the money is extremely useful and often we have either a wonderful staff, who can help us conceptualize something, or skills from our own business background, or connections that are at least equally valuable to the money. Could you just talk a little bit about the role that you, or Bill and Melinda, or the staff of the Foundation, played in helping to create the organization through which this would operate, apart from the money?
"When one is dealing cross-culturally, the ability to listen with an open mind is critical, because, of course, if we don't do that, how can we possibly understand with our own blinders what's going on?"GATES, SR.: Okay. The ingredient here that needs to be recognized is that almost everything that we do is "term." 3 and 5 year terms for grants are almost universal, but very few just write one check. So, really it's a project, and we need to understand what the folks on the ground are doing, as a result of which we have generated a fairly large staff. I think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 people who work at the Foundation today, and that will grow over the next couple of years rather dramatically. And there are people who know about farming in Zambia, people who have been working in that area and are interested in working for the Foundation, and we couldn't possibly manage multimillion dollar grants over a long period of time without keeping track of, and collaborating, with the folks on the ground that are actually delivering the service or making the changes, talking with the governmental organizations about new breeds of cassava, things of that kind. It's so very technical, so much of what we're involved in and you're involved in, that we have to have people in our own organization who can understand and who can guide, at the same time yielding the basic operating decisions and that sort of thing to the folks who are our grantees.
DULANY: But it sounds as though, in addition to the technical people, that the Foundation played a role in really helping to structure the organization through which vaccines would be implemented. So there must be some organizational capacity, or maybe just general wisdom, in the Foundation as well.
GATES, SR.: Well there is a whole spectrum here, Peggy, that certainly the GAVI example is one where there was the organization of a large, complicated, multi-party operation.
DULANY: Can you just say what GAVI stands for?
GATES, SR.: Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. But in the agriculture area, for example, the dimensions are smaller. It's a matter of people who are wanting to get something done, talking essentially to a government agency. The business of breeding and of new types of products, the business of dealing with sophisticated questions over the use of fertilizer and things of that kind. There are people in Zambia and in Namibia and the places where we're working that know about these things, and it's a fairly discrete collaboration in those cases. And it's kind of one-on-one doing. But, we're totally dependent on grantee collaborations.
DULANY: Yes, and taking that one step further, you mentioned the scientists, the medical people. But in the case of agriculture, and actually probably most of the things that you do, what have ordinarily been called beneficiaries or the end-users -- let's take small farmers. You are having to administer such large amounts of money per grant, often to intermediary organizations. What is the philosophy behind including those who, like small farmers, are going to be affected by this agricultural initiative, and to what extent do the people at the Foundation play a role in relating to those at the grassroots level, or is that something that you have to delegate to the grantees to do?
GATES, SR.: Well, by and large, the contact with the ultimate beneficiary, the farmer, is conducted by our grantees. You know, as just a hypothetical for instance, somebody from the Foundation might be in Zambia 3 times a year for a week. In the course of that week, in all cases there would be some contact with farmers. You have to go -- and there's no mystery in this, I am not telling you anything that you don't already know -- that you have to go see it happen. The farmer has to say, "This works" or "I don't understand what they're trying to tell me to do." So we have to have that somewhat hands-on sort of checking and being as fully informed as we can about what's going on. But, basically, it is a tiered thing, and the folks in the Zambian government, with whom we are working, are the people who are actually dishing out the goodies.
DULANY: Yes. But I know that you and Bill and Melinda and Patty and others in the foundation do spend time in the field looking at the impact of the problem. Does that guide your thinking about what needs to be done and how it ought to be approached?
GATES, SR.: Absolutely. That kind of visitation and contact is absolutely critical. I don't understand this at all myself, but I have the absolute conviction that if you think you're going to do something in a foreign place to make some kind of significant difference in that place, there is no possibility of being able to manage a goal of that kind by looking at videos or reading in a book. There is a difference in being there and on the ground with people, with the problem. It's just a different magnitude than sitting in Seattle and trying to learn about something. So the business of Bill and Melinda, for example, it's exactly that. They want that sense of familiarity, that sense of really understanding what's going on. And, of course, there's a second ingredient there, which is just the news. When Bill and Melinda go somewhere, newspaper people show up. They take pictures, they write articles, and they face kids on television. So there's a huge contribution to having people in the place where we're working pay some attention to what we're trying to do, and that of course is enormously helpful.
DULANY: Yes. I happen to believe that especially when one is dealing cross-culturally, that the ability to listen with an open mind is critical, because, of course, if we don't do that, how can we possibly understand with our own blinders what's going on? This is a little bit out of left field, but I have the impression that you're a good listener. Where do you think that came from?
GATES, SR.: [LAUGHTER] I don't know how to answer that question.
DULANY: Okay.
GATES, SR.: No, it does...there's no question that you need to acknowledge your ignorance in order to get ahead in this business.
DULANY: Maybe that's where it starts from. If you recognize that you don't know everything, rather than pretend that you do, then one is more apt to listen. So, in terms of forming these partnerships -- and if you don't feel you are the right person to answer this, please say so. We have encountered many challenges. You know, bad communication among some of the groups we're trying to bring together, or disagreements among them. There's a lot of challenges. Have you run into any of those challenges, and how do you address them through the Foundation?
GATES, SR.: Well what comes to mind is an example. One of the things we have going on is kind of the follow-up work we're doing in libraries. It started as a domestic effort, and when we sort of concluded the work in this country, it seemed to us that it made sense to go on at least in a modest way and do some things overseas. And we sort of pick a country to go to, and to furnish the resources to provide technology, which is to say laptops, to the library, and then train librarians to use them and show their users how to use the computer technology, and to enjoy all of the benefits of being connected with the internet. And it is clearly a big deal that a library gets technology. It changes the nature of the library and multiplies significantly the outreach and the impact.
Anyhow, we decided to work with a country, which I think I'll leave unnamed at the moment, to do this in their country. And it just didn't work. And the problem was that there was a lack of understanding on the part of the beneficiary bureaus and individuals as to how much effort they were going to have to invest. And we kept sending things and waiting for something to happen, and things just didn't happen. And it was probably a shortcoming on our part, because we had had a lot of experience by this time, and we probably should have spent a little more time at the outset talking with the agencies involved and the government individuals involved at what it was they were going to have to do in order for this project to work.
So it was awkward and difficult, but, after a couple of years -- and a couple of years is not a small amount of time -- but it got up and out and it turned out to be very successful. But it's a matter of being careful and diligent about having people understand us and the ingredients of the project.
DULANY: So the issue wasn't that there were groups in that country that were either misunderstanding each other. They were misunderstanding you?
GATES, SR.: No, no. No. It was a misunderstanding between us and the people who were doing the work.
DULANY: Yeah. And can you think of an example where there might have been frictions among the groups you were trying to work with that made it more difficult to achieve what you wanted and how you intervened to overcome that?
GATES, SR.: I'm not sure this is a great example, but, in the vaccine distribution that GAVI has become responsible for, there was conflict at first on the basis that the assumption was the vaccines would be distributed, not having enough to distribute everywhere all at once, that we would find the very poorest countries and work up. Fortunately, there was a very canny Norwegian guy in charge of that operation, and he concluded that that was a disaster that we should not deliver vaccines, unless a country could establish that they had some experience, and that they would do something effective with it. Now that was counterintuitive to a lot of people, and if we're talking about the 70 poorest countries in the world, we were talking about working with number 50 and number 45, rather than with number 70. And that was kind of scratchy for a while. But it turned out to be, no surprise to you, I'm sure, that that turned out to be a very good decision. And, as a matter of fact, that has completely changed now, because of having set standards for which people had to give evidence of being able to meet. Countries have gotten organized, and we are delivering vaccines to number 70 and 69 and 68.
DULANY: Great. So, switching themes a little bit, the Gates/Buffet giving partnership has attracted a lot of attention, and hopefully is stimulating more people to give. From your own perspective, because I am sure you've spoken about this around the country, can you let us know how you think it's affected in the U.S. at least, the climate for giving and the attitude toward giving and partnership with others?
GATES, SR.: Well, I don't know that there's any way to measure this, but there isn't any doubt that the publicity that attended that, and the size of it, the drama of it, has just attracted an enormous amount of attention, and we just have all kinds of evidence at our office of people who were stimulated by that to say, "Hey I can do that." One of the interesting byproducts of it is people who want to send money to us.
DULANY: Really? [LAUGHTER]
GATES, SR.: And that, as you might quickly imagine, that's not the simplest thing in the world to deal with, because there's a tendency of people with resources who want to do something to find what it is they want done, and we don't have time to take even a large gift from somebody who wants something particularly done with it. And it's been a little awkward, a time or two, as you might imagine, to tell someone, "Don't write us a check, please." But we're just not going to do that. We're not going to take money from other people; it's just too complicated. And then we got a check for $465 from some class in Oklahoma that did some kind of a carwash or something and they sent us a check for $465 to help us do the things we want to do. And we thought, "Well, we can't send this check back." And then we said, "Well, maybe we don't have to send all these checks back." So anyway, it unquestionably has...and I'm sure you've seen evidence of it as well. Surely, there is someone or more people who have demonstrated an interest in doing something in philanthropy, triggered in part by Warren's incredible act.
DULANY: Yeah, I mean, actually, I think the statistics have changed, which is quite amazing. It used to be that until recently that less than 2 percent of U.S. giving went outside the country. Now, part of that is changed simply by the Gates Foundation giving and now the Buffet also. But I suspect that somewhere in that statistic is an increase in giving by Americans to other countries, stimulated by the publicity around that. I don't know whether the research has been done.
GATES, SR.: I am sure that there isn't any question. That is surely true.
DULANY: But I mean, it's an interesting thought, actually, what you said about people wanting to give through you. Whether, if that is a significant enough trend, you might want to think of setting up a small staff to help make that happen. Because if people aren't going to do it on their own, but they would do it through some credible organization, and it could significantly increase the resources that are going into these areas. It's just a thought.
GATES, SR.: One of our problems is the fact that we have to press to spend as much money as we need to spend. So there's not a lot of anxiety about getting more money to distribute is the truth of the matter at this point.
DULANY: Right. That's an interesting and different problem you have.
GATES, SR.: Warren's gift basically doubled the size of the foundation. Our outgo is almost exactly doubled by the impact of his gift. So it's caused a huge increase in employment and specifically deciding on some new avenues to make part of the foundation's portfolio.
DULANY: Yeah. You have in this room a number of philanthropists that are seriously concerned with the quality of life for many of the people living at the bottom of the pyramid. What advice do you have for private philanthropists that want to make a difference in reducing poverty?
GATES, SR.: Well, poverty has many faces. Some people are impoverished because they're sick; some people are impoverished because they're uneducated; some people are impoverished because of droughts and natural disasters. A person wanting to do something simply has to focus on some specific objective that has some rational relationship to the resources you're going to apply to the problems. And the thing that we learned early on is that once you decide what you're going to do and focus on something, then there's the clear implication that you're not going to do other things, and that's a little bit awkward to administer.
We actually get into arguments with people about whether this is something within the scope of our interests or not. It always amuses me to write a letter and say, "Well this is not something that we do." And then you get a letter back and it says, "Yes, but over here you did this, you did that." And then an argument with somebody where we're trying to do something right, and they're trying to do something right, and we're arguing about it.
But anyway, it's absolutely vital to find something that is relevant to the issue of poverty that you can manage. We, early on, decided on health. Part of the reason for that is that it seemed to us to lend itself to being fixed. That there are things you can do about the problems of health that eliminate those problems. We could, for example, have decided to be concerned about education. And, as a matter of fact, there may be an argument that the thing we all should be doing more of is being concerned about education. That may be the most fundamental contributor to poverty -- the lack of education. Anyway, we couldn't see any real possibility that we were going to do anything about it, with whatever funding we had. It is so fundamentally a local problem that it was not something we could manage to do anything. So, we decided on health, and of course health has things like vaccines, things like, well, particularly vaccines, medicines, and other preventive things that you just get a huge bang for your buck. And it's working.
DULANY: Yes, thank you. So as we segue into opening this up for questions, I just wanted to raise one other issue, which I think is relevant to this group. We have members, who the current generation has made the money themselves, and then we have members who are several generations' philanthropists, and in a sense, you and I represent that dichotomy. I am the fourth generation of my family.
GATES, SR.: In my case, it's backwards. [LAUGHTER]
DULANY: Right. Well, I have to say that I have huge admiration for you for throwing yourself into this, when this wasn't what you grew up expecting that you were going to be doing. But, in any case, so that's part of our discussion that we have here. If you have been in it for a long time, how do you keep from getting stale? If you are just starting, how do you learn what people who have been in it for a long time have kind of felt their way into? So I'm not necessarily asking you to answer that. I'm just posing it as an issue that we talk about within this group quite a lot. But, if there's a comment you want to make, you're welcome to.
GATES, SR.: Well, the amount of time one could spend becoming sufficiently sophisticated about things is endless. At some point, you make a decision and you sit down and you write a check. And that's a vital part of it. If you never get to the point where you write a check, then you wasted an awful lot of time. Somewhere along the way, you have to decide, "I'm going to do this. And this seems to be something that is worthwhile." The fact of the matter is that in the global poverty health area, there are opportunities not dissimilar from somebody in St. Louis writing a check to the symphony. You don't have to be a Rockefeller or a Gates, inventing solutions and trying to go upstream to find the cause. The matter of finding an existing activity that appeals to you and that's working on a problem that you relate to, it's entirely possible to be an extremely effective philanthropist just by finding the right organization that is doing what you'd like to do and support them financially.
DULANY: Thank you. So, as I'm sure there are going to be a lot of questions and comments. And as you ask yours, if you could say your name and where you are from, maybe what your organization is, that would be great.
QUESTION: The focus of the Gates Foundation, I understand, is health. And I'm wondering if there is a prerequisite to that and I'm wondering what the Gates Foundation is doing in the area of safe drinking water.
GATES, SR.: Well, in the course of enlarging the scope of our activities, this one is on the list. We have a staff member who has spent a lot of time working on it and deliberating about what we might do. So I don't think there's any doubt that we'll add this to the list of things about which we're concerned. And I'm not terribly knowledgeable except enough to say that the water...we insist, this staff person insists, that we don't talk about water. We talk about water/sanitation. That it is a sanitation problem, basically. And the problem is that there's no central place to deal with this. You know, this village, that city, how to bring about widespread improvement is something which we haven't figured out yet. And it may well be that the answer is well you just find some places and do some things and perhaps set some examples. But there isn't the slightest doubt about the centrality of that problem. It's major.
QUESTION: What are the criteria you use in evaluating an organization to whom you are going to give money? You must have standards that you use.
GATES, SR.: By and large, we're talking about people who have been on the ground and who have some kind of a track record. So, basically, what they've done, what they've shown they're able to do now. In some fresher cases, it is a matter of creating an organization, and then it's a matter of finding people who have shown some skill and insight about how to manage complicated problems. But, track record, I would say, is the basic answer to this evaluation process. It's finding people or organizations which have shown some ability to get something done. And, we're somewhat hard-nosed about these grants. I mean, we have criteria, if we're talking about a 5 year problem, that typically involves 5 checks at 5 different times, and that's why we have a fairly large staff. We know what's happened in the first year, and when it comes time to write that second check, there's this decision to be made every time there's an installment due.
QUESTION: We are finding that quite a bit of money ends up with large United Nations organizations. The costs are too high. Also, ends up with large NGOs. Again, the costs are too high. The administration costs are too high. Isn't there a possibility from your foundation to make something to create, enlighten private sector people in all these areas, who could also chip in a little bit by work, by their position over there, by their influence over there, and help to see that the money reaches the right place at the least amount of cost?
GATES, SR.: You need to help me...
DULANY: Yeah, so I guess the question was, given the amount of overhead costs that the U.N. and at large NGO's, is there a role, and could you play a role, in ensuring that private sector people provide some of their time to ensure the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of these grants?
GATES, SR.: Could we play a role?
DULANY: Yeah.
GATES, SR.: Well, I don't think I'm grasping this very well. It may be that we have examples that would benefit people to see how we've managed those issues. We're deliberately not in the business of trying to work with folks who are interested in any training or anything of that kind. I think I am not doing this right...
DULANY: Maybe you could say another word about what you've observed and maybe perhaps since you're a private sector person, what role you've played in doing this.
QUESTION: For example, let's take Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. There are private sector people, capable, with no idea where to spend money, no idea how to get it organized. And I think that something should be done so that this capacity, which is lying idle, honest, good capacity of good entrepreneurs there, how can we make sure that we get them involved in this kind of business in providing help?
GATES, SR.: Well, is part of the answer to join Synergos? [LAUGHTER]
DULANY: Thank you for that little advertisement.
GATES, SR.: But that is what you're doing.
DULANY: It is, actually. And I guess it's not what the Gates Foundation is doing.
QUESTION: First I wanted to recognize the importance that you placed on finding staff and on understanding that knowing what to do and what the right answer was couldn't be invented in Seattle. And this was a real moment of leadership in the foundation community. We were talking about partnerships, and it seems to me too that you played a quite wonderful role in bringing together corporate groups with governments. I used Botswana as an example, and I would say that without Gates acting as the intermediary, you wouldn't have been able to bring Merck together with the government of Botswana to deliver what you've done. So there is a huge role in convening and connecting that I think is an enormously important one. And you may have a couple more examples where you've done that very well.
GATES, SR.: It was really amazing to us to discover almost right away the incredible ability we have to convene. Very early on, we got involved in this question of nutrition and supplements to rice and salt and things having to do with the absence of minerals and the diet of people in poor countries. And so we said, "Well, what can we do about that?" And then we sent out a request to a bunch of people, and largely in foreign places, to come together and talk about that. This was something that was years ago, and it was just amazing the response was just virtually 100 percent. And it turns out to be one of the things that I think is particularly important in the work that we do, is the ability to get a bunch of people together concerned about a particular problem and talking about it and organizing around it.
To me, the most fun example of that is the Grand Challenges initiative where we got a bunch of scientific folks together to talk about what are the major challenges of solving the problems of global health. And they met and talked for a year or so and came up with I think 14 themes that needed to be done. One, for example, is some way to have vaccines that didn't have to be kept cold. And another was a way to vaccinate people without piercing the skin. There are a variety of things of that kind. And then we put out a request for proposals and got 700 proposals, something of that kind...really quite a marvelous thing. We ended up with 44 projects going on. I've forgotten the dollar numbers involved. And they are five-year projects, and it was just, I think, a very constructive thing that we were able to get that kind of an interest and following to what could turn out to be some very, very important projects. A lot them, we know perfectly well that out of those 44, or whatever, a whole bunch of them aren't going to end up being anything, which incidentally is the incredible value of private funding. There is no way you could get a government to spend money on those kinds of things, and they shouldn't. I mean, people in politics can't afford to lose money, and that's the way it ought to be.
I'm going afield, I'm sorry. But it is really important to be able to get people together who are concerned about an isolated problem and talk about it and exchange ideas about the mechanics of dealing with it. Just it's absolutely critical. So that's something we're doing a lot of.
DULANY: And I think that's a great point. And thanks for raising that, because I think that's probably a capacity that everyone in this room has, to convene people around a problem. And so I hope that we're all thinking about using that as well as the other assets that we have.
QUESTION: Apparently, the demand for resources, the world over, has been growing faster than the supply. Or at least it doesn't look like our children are going to inherit a very beautiful world. At the same time, we go to a needy community, and there are several beautiful initiatives there operating, but not communicating. There is overlapping, there is waste, so don't you think there is an urgent need that we start to operate as a network or at least in a more organized way?
GATES, SR.: I'm sorry.
DULANY: Yeah, no that's okay. So the question is there's too much duplication overlapping of initiatives, and isn't there a need to begin to operate in a more organized way as a network?
GATES, SR.: I guess I wouldn't have identified that as problem. And I'm sure you know something that I don't know. You know, my view of it is all the vacant spots, not the duplicated spots, that there is so much to be done that nobody is doing. I am trying hard to think of some area where there is less than efficiency as a result of more than one group being interested in doing something. I don't have an example of that, I'm sorry.
DULANY: I think this is a really interesting example of how people think differently, and I've noticed the Gates Foundation, and now I see partly where it's coming from, has a really clear focus on identifying a problem, identifying a strategy, working on it, achieving it. I think you and probably I, look at the organizational structure of a community, who is doing what, where the overlaps are, and then we come at it from a different way. It's simply two different ways of approaching problems. We need those two and probably many more in the world. So it's just different orientations.
Bill, I'd like to thank you very, very much for taking this time....
GATES, SR.: My pleasure.