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November 27 - December 20, 2023
We shared our personal passions and philosophies. We were asked to reflect on who we are, both in our home lives and at work. How do we connect our work persona with our life persona? People talked about spirituality, their Catholic roots, their study of Confucian teachings, they shared their struggles as parents and their unending dedication to making products that people love to use for work and entertainment. As I listened, I realized that in all of my years at Microsoft this was the first time I’d heard my colleagues talk about themselves, not exclusively about business matters.
is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people. Ideas excite me. Empathy grounds and centers me.
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.
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.
With only a few years under my belt as Microsoft’s CEO, it felt premature to write about how we’ve succeeded or failed on my watch. We’ve made a lot of progress since that SLT meeting, but we still have a long way to go. That’s also why I’m not interested in writing a memoir. I’ll save that for my dotage. But several arguments convinced me to carve out a little time at this stage of my life to write. I felt the tug of responsibility to tell our story from my perspective. It’s also a time of enormous social and economic disruption accelerated by technological breakthroughs.
Really like this awareness, broader perspective
Books are so often written by leaders looking back on their tenures, not while they’re in the fog of war. What if we could share the journey together, the meditations of a sitting CEO in the midst of a massive transformation?
In fact, as part of the interview process one of the board members suggested that if I wanted to be CEO, I needed to be clear that I was hungry for the job. I thought about this and even talked to Steve. He laughed and simply said, “It’s too late to be different.” It just wouldn’t be me to display that kind of personal ambition.
Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves.
When I was about six, my five-month-old sister died. It had a huge impact on me and our family. Mom had to give up working after that. I think my sister’s death was the last straw.
But my father believed passing the IAS exam was merely the entry point to being able to take even more important exams. He was a quintessential lifelong learner. But unlike most of my peers at that time, whose high-achieving parents applied tremendous pressure to achieve, I didn’t face any of that. My mom was just the opposite of a tiger mom. She never pressured me to do anything other than just be happy.
school. I was not academically great and nor was the school known to push academics. If you liked to study physics, you studied physics. If you felt like, oh, science was too boring and you wanted to study history, you studied history. There wasn’t that intense peer pressure to follow a particular path.
By twelfth grade if you had asked me about my dream it was to attend a small college, play cricket for Hyderabad, and eventually work for a bank. That was it. Being an engineer and going to the West never occurred to me. My mom was happy with those plans. “That’s fantastic, son!” But my dad really forced the issue. He said, “Look, you’ve got to get out of Hyderabad.
It was hard to break from my circle of friends, but Dad was right. I was being provincial with my ambitions. I needed some perspective. Cricket was my passion, but computers were a close second.
There is much to be said for my mother’s philosophy of life, which influenced how I thought about my own future and opportunities. 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. That has stood me in good stead all my life.
This is good
What I remember was the quiet. Everything was quiet. Milwaukee was just stunning, pristine. I thought, god, this place is heaven on earth. It was summer. It was beautiful, and my life in the United States was just beginning.
India. I was a smoker at the time
That’s a fun fact
come. To my first question, why does Microsoft exist, the message was loud and clear. We exist to build products that empower others. That is the meaning we’re all looking to infuse into our work.
Then, I’d be reminded again “consistency is better than perfection.”
The work in these first few years of my tenure was all about getting the flywheel of change spinning. Sure, it took regular communications, but it also took discipline and consistency on my part and that of the senior leadership team. We needed to inspire and drive change. We challenged ourselves, “At the end of the next year if we were tried in a court of law and the charge was that we failed to pursue our mission, would there be enough evidence to convict us?”
Over time these changes meant that some executives left. They were all talented people, but the senior leadership team needed to become a cohesive team that shared a common worldview.
We needed everyone to view the SLT as his or her first team, not just another meeting they attended.
I like to think of the SLT as a sort of Legion of Superheroes, with each leader coming to the table with a unique superpower to contribute for the common good. Amy is our conscience, keeping us intellectually honest and accountable for doing what we committed to do.
Amy Hood, our CFO, understood the culture change we needed to navigate. She also became the crucial partner I needed for precise attention to quantitative detail across the business. Her job is where the rubber meets the road.
Dr. Dweck’s research is about overcoming failures by believing you can. “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.
And so beyond this one measure called GDP, we have practically a moral obligation to continue to innovate, to build technology to solve big problems—to be a force for good in the world as well as a tool for economic growth. How can we harness technology to tackle society’s greatest challenges—the climate, cancer, and the challenge of providing people with useful, productive, and meaningful work to replace the jobs eliminated by automation?
The most profound difference between leaders is whether they fear or embrace new technology. It’s a difference that can determine the trajectory of a nation’s economy.
Professor Comin is soft-spoken and weighs his words carefully, relying on the precision and thoroughness of his knowledge to carry conviction.
They found that, on average, countries tend to adopt a new technology about forty-five years after its invention, although this time lag has shortened in recent years.
The resulting failure of governments to encourage rapid and intensive use of new technologies means that the trend toward growing economic inequality between the haves and the have-nots of the world has continued unabated.
Interesting perspective
The Gini coefficient for a particular population is generally expressed as a fraction. Perfect equality would be represented by a value of zero, while maximum inequality would be represented by a value of one. In the real world, the Gini coefficient for any given country or region is expressed by a fraction somewhere in between those two extremes. The Gini coefficient for an advanced European country like Germany has hovered around .3 for decades, while the figure for the United States has risen for years, now matching that of China and Mexico at over .4.
∑ (Education + Innovation) × Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth
Regardless of location—Detroit, Egypt, or Indonesia—this new input needs to turn into local economic surplus. Breakthrough technologies, plus a workforce trained to use them productively, multiplied by the intensity of their use spreads economic growth and opportunity.
What, Reaganomics? Surprising
To make that happen, leaders need to prioritize entrepreneurship in several major ways.
Economic growth v equality. Very few people ctually want to be entrepreneurs
We need to invent a new social contract for this age of AI and automation that fosters the equilibrium between individual labor—one’s agency, wages, sense of purpose, and fulfillment—and the return on capital.
In fact, a number of states competed to land the plant. “A lot of people have that misconception that automation decreases jobs,” a production manager on the line said. “It’s just a different type of job, a more skilled job.” Without the robots, the human jobs wouldn’t exist.
ut wht are the jobs? What d they pay? How mang were there before? This i skimpy
Spillover effects on the economy are pretty limited for technologies that don’t foster a more equitable ratio of consumption to creation. Nonetheless, Wall Street has put a lot of value recently on these consumption technologies.
Netflix? Facebook? Amazon? Apple?
I say it because a better world is better for business. It’s important to be dedicated to creating great products, serving customers, and earning profits for our investors—but it’s not sufficient. We also need to think about the impact of our actions on the world and its citizens long into the future.
Why do I exist?” “Why does our institution exist?” “What is the role of a multinational corporation in our world? “What is the role of a leader in digital technology, especially as the world turns to tech as such a crucial input to drive growth?”
Great qs for anyone
This dynamic, coupled with Baldwin’s findings, have at least in part fueled today’s anti-globalist fervor, and as a result now invite introspection on both our public education and public health priorities.
What re you sagying here
In the face of these many coming shifts, there must be a new social contract that helps to achieve economic surplus and opportunity on a more equitable basis. To get there, what will the new labor movement look like?
But I also subscribe to the notion that the bigger a company is, the more responsibility its leader has to think about the world, its citizens, and their long-term opportunities. You’re not going to have much of a stable business if you don’t think about the growing inequities around the world and do your part to help improve conditions for everyone.
We’re providing the resources countless people can use to build something that will outlast themselves, whether that’s a small business, a school, a clinic, or a giant enterprise creating jobs and opportunity for millions. This culture needs to be a microcosm of the world we hope to create outside the company.
