life lessons

This is an excerpt i pulled out of an interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. My sweet friend Tabitha passed this along and you can read the whole article here.

Q. What other leadership lessons have you learned?

A. One very important partner I had in life was my father. He was a senior managing director of Nippon Steel Corporation and was one of the architects of the reconstruction of Japan after the war. He negotiated the first World Bank loan to Japan after the war to the steel industry, and it helped develop heavy industries in Japan. His outlook was always international. Very early, he sent me to the United States. I was 15. He sent me to a boarding school, Andover.

His whole idea was that you can’t possibly be competitive in the world unless you actually go outside your own geography and learn the way other people live and think. That probably was the most important lesson I learned — that what’s out there is more important than what you already know, and that you’d better go out and learn what it is out there that you don’t know.

Q. What else?

A. A second key lesson was from a doctor named Marcel Tuchman. He was the most compassionate person I have ever met in my life — I mean, full of human kindness. And every time he met somebody, you had the sense that he cared more about them than anything else in the world.

So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.

So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.