Patty Stonesifer, 43, may have the best job in the world. What she does every day as chairwoman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is think about how to give away chunks of money that amount to the annual income of a small nation. That's not as simple as it sounds. She will tell you it's an easy thing to do badly: to write checks to the wrong people and tell them to come back in a few years when they need a little more. But to do it well, to apply all those billions where they will make the most difference, is a job and an obsession that take up almost every minute of her post-Microsoft career.
Think about it: the world's problems are a drowning pool of need. Even Bill Gates' $65 billion--most of which he has vowed to give away before he dies--won't make a dent if it's managed poorly.
Stonesifer, sitting in a coffeehouse in Redmond, Wash., draws a diagram of a river, then stick-figure babies floating in the river and then her plan for heading upstream to where those babies are falling into the river and solving the problem there. She's told this story two dozen times. But there is a fervor in her brown eyes and a drill-to-the-core focus that made her the top female executive at Microsoft until her retirement, at age 40, in 1997. She does not draw a salary for her work with the Gates Foundation. "We have an approach here that is very much based on the enthusiasm the Gateses have," Stonesifer says. "We can cause enormous health improvements rapidly." She talks in terms of saving millions of lives, of improving billions of lives.
The foundation, with $22 billion in assets, of which it spends $1 billion each year, is the most richly endowed philanthropic organization on earth, last year surpassing Britain's Wellcome Trust. Or look at it this way: Gates, 44, has given more money away faster than anyone else in history. For Stonesifer and the Gates family--Bill, his wife Melinda and his father Bill Sr.--that means sitting down with doctors, scientists and veteran philanthropists. It means performing the research and hard-nosed analysis that Gates and Stonesifer had done for years in developing software products, but applying it instead to eradicating malaria or polio in developing countries.
Gates' first great non-Microsoft project, started in 1997, was paying billions to wire America's libraries. He deployed high-tech task forces that fanned out across the U.S. equipped with computers, modems and software, bridging the digital divide for poorer school districts. There is a room on the second floor of the Gates Foundation's new Seattle office complex that is command central for that initiative, where huge national maps are studded with pins showing which library districts have been wired--22,530 computers in 4,540 libraries in the U.S. and 4,024 computers in 1,435 libraries in Canada. So far, about $92 million has been spent on the library program. This is the war room of a battle Bill is winning. The wiring project will last until 2005, and is being expanded to libraries around the world.