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July 11 - July 11, 2020
I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture.
Our culture had been rigid. Each employee had to prove to everyone that he or she knew it all and was the smartest person in the room.
First, we needed to obsess about our customers. At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology. There
Second, we are at our best when we actively seek diversity and inclusion.
Finally, we are one company, one Microsoft—not a confederation of fiefdoms. Innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, our org boundaries, so we have to learn to transcend those barriers.
Answers to questions like these serve as a great barometer for the culture we need. Demonstrating a growth mindset. Customer-centric. Diverse and inclusive. One company.
Culture change is hard. It can be painful. The fundamental source of resistance to change is fear of the unknown. Really big questions for which there are no certain answers can be scary.
“Without a doubt I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap. I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice.
Likewise, an employee is right to put his or her head down and work hard, but they also have the right to expect a pathway to greater responsibility and recognition when they do. There must be balance.
“To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”
The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute.
Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company.
Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions.
Internally, we needed to have strong partnerships—between leaders across the company among teams. But that same growth mindset was needed externally, too. The competitive landscape had shifted seismically over the previous decade, and now new and surprising partnerships with friends and former enemies were needed.
The outer ring is concepts. Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon may have an exciting product idea, but is that enough? An organization may have a conceptual vision—a dream or imagination filled with new ideas and new approaches, but do they have what’s in the second ring: capabilities? Do they have the engineering and design skills required to actually build that concept alone? And finally, the bull’s-eye, is a culture that embraces new concepts and new capabilities and doesn’t choke them out. That’s what’s needed in order to build and sustain innovation-producing and customer-pleasing products—smart
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One way to explain the logic is by turning to game theory, which uses mathematical models to explain cooperation and conflict. Partnering is too often seen as a zero-sum game—whatever is gained by one participant is lost by another. I don’t see it that way. When done right, partnering grows the pie for everyone—for customers, yes, but also for each of the partners. Ultimately the consensus was that this partnership with Apple would help to ensure Office’s value was available to everyone, and Apple was committing to make its iOS really show off the great things Office can do, which would
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For me, partnerships—particularly with competitors—have to be about strengthening a company’s core businesses, which ultimately centers on creating additional value for the customer. For a platform company, that means doing new things with competitors that can accrue value back to one of the platforms.
We compete vigorously with Amazon in the cloud market; there’s no ambiguity about that. But why can’t Microsoft and Amazon partner in other areas? For example, Bing powers the search experience on Amazon Fire tablets.
The first is engaging their customer base by leveraging data to improve the customer experience. Second, they must empower their own employees by enabling greater and more mobile productivity and collaboration in the new digital world of work. Third, they must optimize operations, automating and simplifying business processes across sales, operations, and finance. Fourth, they must transform their products, services, and business models.
and I don’t let the limitations of the past dictate the contours of the future.
“When is a partnership appropriate as opposed to an acquisition?” The answer is best framed as another question, “Can we create more value for customers by coming together as one entity or as two?”
Employees. Customers. Products. Partners. Each element needs time, attention, and focus if I’m going to create the value for which I am ultimately accountable. All four are important, and without discipline even the best managers can overlook one or more.
Employees and products command attention every day, as they are closest to us; customers provide the resources we need to do anything, so they also command energy. But partners provide the lift we need to soar.
Originally, I thought of this book as a collection of meditations from a CEO in the midst of transformation. As someone both navigating a corporate transformation and creating transformational technologies, my aim was to share these experiences in real time rather than look back on them years later.
We actually had a tablet before the iPad; we were well along the path toward an e-reader before the Kindle.
There is no formula to inventing the future. A company has to have a complete vision for what it can uniquely do, and then back it up with conviction and the capability to make it happen.
three Cs—do we have an exciting concept, do we have the capabilities necessary to succeed, and a culture that welcomes these new ideas and approaches?
Doug Engelbart in the 1960s performed “the mother of all demos,” introducing the mouse, hypertext, and shared-screen teleconferencing. Engelbart’s Law states that the rate of human performance is exponential; that while technology will augment our capabilities, our ability to improve upon improvements is a uniquely human endeavor. He essentially founded the field of human-computer interaction. There
“He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’”
Developers and fans chose Galaxy Explorer, which enables you to look out your window and navigate the Milky Way—moving through it at your own pace, zooming in, annotating what you see, and storing the experience for later. It replicates the environment of a planet on your room’s walls—dusty winds, hot plasma, and ice formations.
bespoke,
Originating in the 1980s, quantum computing leverages certain quantum physics properties of atoms or nuclei that allow them to work together as quantum bits, or qubits, to be the computer’s processor and memory. By interacting with each other while being isolated from our environment, qubits can perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional, or classical, computers.
Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors in a device’s integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
different from our dozen or so competitors in this space. The enemy of quantum computing is “noise”—that is, electronic interference like cosmic rays, bolts of lightning, and even your neighbor’s cell phone—which is very difficult to overcome and is one of the reasons that most quantum technologies operate at extremely low temperatures.
TQC reduces the quantum resource overhead by two to three orders of magnitude over other approaches. This kind of a topological qubit is naturally less error-prone than other approaches because it’s more impervious to noise. While this approach requires discovery in new areas of fundamental physics, the potential benefits are incredible.
What’s become clear is that the world needs a Digital Geneva Convention, a broader multilateral agreement that affirms cybersecurity norms as global rules.
Expanding the effort even further, we joined with AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yahoo in forming an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance.
He pointed out the irony in the fact that leaders of an industry that thrives on freedom are in fact resisting government efforts to safeguard that freedom. He went on to say, while it’s too much to expect Silicon Valley tech experts to enlist as government tools in the fight against terrorism, a little cooperation shouldn’t be too much to ask.
E + SV + SR = T/t Empathy + Shared values + Safety and Reliability = Trust over time
Trust is more than a handshake. It’s the agreement, the bond, between users of digital services and the suppliers of those services that enables us to enjoy, be productive, learn, explore, express, create, be informed.
We live in a time of what David Gelernter calls the “mirror worlds”: the physical world is mirrored in an online world where data is accumulating and taking on more and more significance.
Now it is our generation’s turn to design legal and regulatory systems that will discourage and punish the evil while encouraging the good to flourish—and to do so in a fashion that will enhance the overall level of trust in society as a whole.
interred
They tell us that we should create new processes and laws that promote public trust by facilitating timely access to data while ensuring appropriate privacy protections for individuals. This
When talking and chatting with other people, often you aren’t looking to complete a task, but rather to connect socially and develop a relationship. Much of our software is focused completely on using conversational AI to determine when we are focused on a task, but much more of our time is spent exploring and engaging in chitchat.
market for these virtual digital assistants worldwide will reach nearly $16 billion by 2021,
AI will fail if it can’t complement its IQ with EQ.
Steps in this direction are already being taken. In 2016, with little fanfare, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM announced a Partnership on AI to benefit people and society. The aim is to advance public understanding of AI and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field. The partnership will advance research into developing and testing safe AI systems in areas like automobiles and health care, human-AI collaboration, economic displacement, and how AI can be used for social good.
I would argue that the most productive debate we can have about AI isn’t one that pits good vs. evil, but rather one that examines the values instilled in the people and institutions creating this technology. In his book Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff writes, “The best way to answer the hard questions about control in a world full of smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building these systems.”
First, we want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
