Bill Gates appeared at the TED conference last week and made a presenting mistake that put his usual gaffe-ridden style in the shade.  He made the classic mistake of not respecting his audience: http://tinyurl.com/b5um5b. 

And it’s a shame, because he was talking about important, life-saving work that he and his Gates Foundation are doing around the world, specifically on stopping malaria and improving education. 

In many ways, it was a typical Bill Gates speech, perhaps a little better than most.  It was well-written, if a little self-absorbed, and the slides were neither overwhelming nor too wordy.  Not bad for the Chief Perpetrator of Power Point. 

To be sure, Gates evidenced his usual nervous, self-conscious body language, and he needs to work on his voice, but by now we’re familiar with those problems.  They weren’t really getting in the way of his delivery, because his status as one of the richest men in the world means that we’ll listen even if he looks like an uncomfortable nerd. 

The disaster happened about half-way through the speech, in the section on malaria.  Bill suddenly moved toward a little table placed in the middle of the stage, and released a (small) swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd, as he put it, of millionaires. 

He commented that he wanted the crowd to get a sense of what poor people were up against. 

I suspect most people in the audience had experienced mosquitoes before, if not perhaps the malaria-carrying kind, so the remark showed an insensitivity to the audience at that simple level.  But at another, deeper, level, it showed a lack of respect of the audience, and here’s where the presentation really went south. 

Respect for audiences should be paramount in a speaker’s mind, and that means treating them like adults, free to decide what hazards they want to face for themselves.  To release mosquitoes on a crowd feels like token harassment, and takes decision-making power away from that audience.  It’s arrogant and presumptuous.  And it’s a cheap stunt. 

Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you get to treat audiences like guinea pigs without their consent.  Respect for an audience should be the first and last thing a speaker thinks about when giving a presentation. 

Comments

[Nick Morgan]

You miss the point of the article. You have to keep straight the difference between the real audience and the virtual. It's simply not the same to see mosquitoes on the screen and to have them in the room with you. The disrespect was to the people in the room. Not anyone watching on TED.com.

Real people in a live audience deserve respect, which means not being subject to potential danger, no matter how tiny, without their permission. It's the lack of choice that's the point. For you, watching on your computer, the point doesn't come up.

Of course Bill's foundation is doing great things about malaria, and of course any right-thinking person applauds that. Just because he's doing good, though, doesn't mean that he can treat the audience badly.

[Luis OLiveira]

Tou're wrong, so very wrong, and the fact that you're discussing his presentation and his stunt proves it.

He wasn't talking only at TED. He's talking to the entire world. I did not feel disrespected in any way.

At the end, you know more about malaria now than you knew before, and that's all that really matters.