If his life had taken a couple of different turns, Jeff Raikes might have had a long career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

That was the goal for the farm kid from Ashland when he headed off to Stanford University.

But from the day he left the farm, several twists and turns helped shape his life before he arrived at Microsoft and became prominent in the nation’s information economy.

Raikes went to Stanford because his father wanted him to get a business education and had read that Stanford had a top business school.

But when Raikes arrived, he discovered that great business school didn’t exist for undergraduates. So he went into engineering instead.

“I had this dream that I was going to help change the world in a positive way through agricultural education,” said Raikes, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former Microsoft executive.

Raikes was at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Friday attending events dedicating the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management.

Just before he graduated from Stanford, he bought an Apple computer.

That experience convinced him to apply for a job at the company, which he got.

Raikes said he quickly learned that he was passionate about computer software, but decided Apple, which was focused on hardware at the time, wasn’t the best place to indulge his passion.

So in 1981, he took a chance and went to work for a small Seattle company with 100 employees and about $12 million in annual revenue: Microsoft.

Over the next 27 years, he held a variety of roles at the company that became the world’s largest software company, finally retiring this year as president of Microsoft’s Business Division.

Earlier this month, he began his job at the helm of the Gates Foundation, the largest private charitable foundation in the world.

“Most people in life don’t get their dream job,” the 50-year-old Raikes said. “I’m getting two.”

Pretty good for a Nebraska farm boy whose career aspiration was to work in agriculture for the federal government.

“It’s very good and important to have a plan,” Raikes told an audience of students, university officials and others during a speech Friday at the Nebraska Union. “But … it’s very good to be open to opportunity .”

Raikes and his wife, Tricia, donated $10 million for the school now named for him, and Raikes has served as an adviser to faculty and a mentor to students.

Raikes’ speech focused on leadership, and he said it was his small town upbringing that laid the groundwork to be a good leader.

He said leaders need to be able to “roll up their sleeves” and go to work, and they also need to be able to take complexities, parse them down “and really figure out what’s important.”

Raikes also listed some of the people he’s encountered who he considers great leaders, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former Microsoft president Jon Shirley and baseball manager Lou Piniella.

Raikes said he considered the past 30 years to be an “information revolution,” on par with the Renaissance and industrial revolution.

People 50, even 100 years from now will look back and see this as a period of time that changed the world, he said.

“For me, gosh, what a lucky kid from Nebraska,” Raikes said.

Reach Matt Olberding at 473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com.