Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella

If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity.

The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation.

a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition.

One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.

third is the central importance of leadership.

That is what leadership is about. It’s about bringing out the best in everyone.

when to intervene and when to build the confidence of an individual and a team.

that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bols...

the people you’re...

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. It’s an art form, not a science. And a leader will

“Our industry does not respect tradition. What it respects is innovation.

we must discover what would be lost in the world

if

Microsoft just dis...

envy is negative and outer-directed, not driven from within, and so I knew that it wouldn’t carry us very far down the path to true renewal.

My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness.

while our competitors defined their products as mobile, we could be about the mobility of human experiences, experiences made possible by our cloud technologies. These two trends together, mobile and cloud, were fundamental to our transformation.

There are many lessons a leader can take from the Nokia acquisition.

Buying a company with weak market share is always risky.

We should only be in the phone business when we have something

that is really differentiated.

Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of my leadership for years to come.

They wanted a clear, tangible and inspiring vision.

They wanted to hear more frequently about progress in transparent and simple ways.

What they really demanded was a road map to remove paralysis.

inviting founders of companies we had acquired in the year prior. These new Microsoft leaders were mission-oriented, innovative, born in the mobile-first and cloud-first world.

fresh, outside perspective.

most of these leaders did not officially “qualify” to go to executive retreats given the person’...

But they showed up bright eyed, completely ignorant of the history they were breaking. They asked questions. They shared their own journeys. They pushed us to be better.

scheduling customer visits during the retreat.

Do you think we don’t know what our customers really need?

to meet with our customers—schools, universities, large enterprises, nonprofits, startups, hospitals, small businesses, and the like. The executives listened. They learned together. They made new connections with one another.

They experienced the power of having a diverse, cross-company team solving customer’s problems together.

They were then pointed to dinner tables with the assignment to share their own account of where the company’s culture stood and their ideas on how to evolve it. Some

The change was coming from within.

Getting our strategy right had preoccupied me from the beginning. But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

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 phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is ‘growth mindset,’ because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude—that mindset—of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.”

it’s too simplistic to call a country like Kenya a developing economy or the United States a developed one. Both countries

have educated, tech-savvy customers capable of using our most sophisticated products, and both countries have potential customers with little or no skills.

but it’s a false distinction simply to think of countries as either de...

I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture.

anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission.

An organizational culture is not something that can simply unfreeze, change, and then refreeze in an ideal way. It takes deliberate work, and it takes some specific ideas about what the culture should become. It also requires dramatic, concrete actions that seize the attention of team members and push them out of their familiar comfort zones.

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. Accountability—delivering on time and hitting numbers—trumped everything. Meetings were formal. Everything had to be planned in perfect detail before the meeting. And it was hard to do a skip-level meeting. If a senior leader wanted to tap the energy and creativity of someone lower down in the organization, she or he needed to invite that person’s boss, and so on. Hierarchy and pecking order had taken control, and spontaneity and creativity had suffered as a result.

The culture change I wanted was actually rooted in the Microsoft I originally joined. It was centered on exercising a growth mind...

First, we needed to obsess about o...

At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unme...

When we talk to customers, we need to listen. It’s not an idle exercise. It is about being able to predict things that customers will love. That’s growth mindset.

We learn about our customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring them solutions that meet their needs.