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July 11 - July 11, 2020
In the midst of these troubled times, a cartoonist drew the Microsoft organization chart as warring gangs, each pointing a gun at another.
Like athletes, we all navigate our own high-stakes environments, and I thought our team could learn something from Dr. Gervais’s approach.
The answers were hard to pull out, even though they were just beneath the surface. Fear: of being ridiculed; of failing; of not looking like the smartest person in the room. And arrogance: I am too important for these games.
conversation with a friend, or from a lesson with a teacher. My personal philosophy and my passion, developed over time and through exposure to many different experiences, is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people. Ideas excite me. Empathy grounds and centers me.
“Imagine you see a baby lying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” he asked. “You call 911,” I replied without much forethought. Richard walked me out of his office, put his arm around me, and said, “You need some empathy, man. If a baby is laying on a street crying, pick up the baby.”
I learned that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.
However, things are always changing. If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups or downs of life. And only then would you be ready to develop that deeper sense of empathy and compassion for everything around you. The computer scientist in me loved this compact instruction set for life.
Empathy, coupled with new ideas, had helped to create eye-gaze tracking technology, a breakthrough natural user interface that assists people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and cerebral palsy to have more independence.
one that is taking place today inside me and inside of our company, driven by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others. But most important, it’s about the change coming in every life as we witness the most transformative wave of technology yet—one that will include artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations, and societies can and must transform—hit refresh—in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance, and renewal.
At the core, it’s about us humans and the unique quality we call empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before.
Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves. I worried that failing to ask these questions, and truly answer them, risked perpetuating earlier mistakes and, worse, not being honest. Every
quaint,
She always believed in doing your thing, and at your pace. Pace comes when you do your thing. So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you.
The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation.
On reflection, a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition.
cantankerous
One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.
I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading. That team captain went on to play many years of prestigious Ranji Trophy competition, and he taught me a very valuable lesson.
Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible. The culmination of these experiences has provided the raw material for the transformation we are undergoing today—a set of principles based on the alchemy of purpose, innovation, and empathy.
An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities.
we had to be great at understanding and building two-sided markets—the economics of a new online business. On one side are the consumers who go online for search results, and on the other side are the advertisers who want their businesses to be found.
Yahoo integrated Bing as its search engine, and together we powered a quarter of all U.S. searches.
“The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must come from within.”
the urgent need to build shared context, trust, and credibility with your team. The
Our team had to learn to embrace what I called “live site first” culture.
A leader must see the external opportunities and the internal capability and culture—and all of the connections among them—and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom.
To make matters worse, not only were PC sales soft, but so was interest in Windows 8, launched eighteen months earlier. Meanwhile Android and Apple operating systems were surging, reflections of the smartphone explosion that we at Microsoft had failed to lead and barely managed to participate in. As a result, Microsoft’s stock, long a blue-chip investment, had been treading water for years.
“Our industry does not respect tradition. What it respects is innovation. It’s our collective challenge to make Microsoft thrive in a mobile-first and a cloud-first world.”
Worldview is an interesting term, rooted in cognitive philosophy. Simply put, it is how a person comprehensively sees the world—across political, social, and economic borders.
My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness.
Buying a company with weak market share is always risky.
Communicate clearly and regularly our sense of mission, worldview, and business and innovation ambitions. Drive cultural change from top to bottom, and get the right team in the right place. Build new and surprising partnerships in which we can grow the pie and delight customers. Be ready to catch the next wave of innovation and platform shifts. Reframe our opportunity for a mobile- and cloud-first world, and drive our execution with urgency.
Stand for timeless values, and restore productivity and economic growth for everyone.
The mission of a company is in many ways a statement about its soul, and that’s where I went first.
“consistency is better than perfection.”
Our three ambitions defined how we organized teams and reported results.
We will obsess over helping people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data, and social networks. We will build software to be more predictive, personal, and helpful. We will think about customers as “dual users,” people who use technology for their work, their school, and their personal digital life.
The first change to the retreat was inviting founders of companies we had acquired in the year prior.
Another decision, not universally loved, was scheduling customer visits during the retreat.
Perhaps the most important thing we did during the experimental retreat was engage the leaders in more open and honest dialogue about our cultural evolution.
to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are in the empowerment business, I said as I took the stage, and not just to empower startups and tech-savvy users on the American West Coast, but everyone on the planet.
First, we must reinvent productivity and business processes.
We needed to evolve beyond simply building individual productivity tools and start designing an intelligent fabric for computing based on four principles—collaboration, mobility, intelligence, and trust.
Second, we will build the intelligent cloud platform, an ambition closely linked with the first ambition.
Third, we needed to move people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows by creating more personal computing.
Rediscovering the soul of Microsoft, redefining our mission, and outlining the business ambitions that would help investors and customers grow our company—these had been my priorities with the first inkling that I would become CEO.
Culture can be a vague and amorphous term. In his perceptive book, Culture, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote that the idea of culture is multifaceted, “a kind of social unconscious.” With razor precision, he separates culture into four different meanings, but the most relevant for an organization is the values, customs, beliefs, and symbolic practices that men and women live and breathe each day.
I think of culture as a complex system made up of individual mindsets—the mindsets of those in front of me. Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it.
“The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” She divides the world between learners and non-learners, demonstrating that a fixed mindset will limit you and a growth mindset can move you forward. The hand you are dealt is just the starting point. Passion, toil, and training can help you to soar. (She even writes persuasively about what she calls the “CEO disease,” an affliction of business leaders who fail to have a growth mindset.)
We spent five years of our lives splitting time and family between Vancouver and Seattle in order to augment her regular schooling while keeping Zain’s care consistent in Seattle.
