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Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind.
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.
At the end of the day, we all came to the same stark realization: No one leader, no one group, and no one CEO would be the hero of Microsoft’s renewal. If there was to be a renewal, it would take all of us and all parts of each of us.
The mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
Cricket attracts an estimated 2.5 billion fans globally, compared with just half a billion baseball fans.
On reflection, a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition.
My approach has never been to conduct business as usual. Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible.
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.
Cloud providers invested in enormous data centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution.
applied machine learning (ML). ML is a very rich form of data analytics that is foundational to artificial intelligence.
found that the key was agility, agility, agility. We needed to develop speed, nimbleness, and athleticism to get the consumer experience right, not just once but daily.
“The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must come from within.”
Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS),” he wrote. Amazon was leading a revolution and we had not even mustered our troops.
As a company, we’d been very publicly missing the mobile revolution, but we were not about to miss the cloud.
There was constant tension between diverging forces. On the one hand, the division’s leaders would say, “Yes, there is this cloud thing,” and “Yes, we should incubate it,” but, on the other hand, they would quickly shift to warning, “Remember, we’ve got to focus on our server business.”
but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective. His team paid the ultimate price.
To win their support, I needed to build shared context. I decided not to bring my old team from Bing with me. It was important that the transformation come from within, from the core.
database company Couchbase.
more importantly, we needed to ensure that we viewed our opportunity not through a rearview mirror, but with a more future-oriented perspective.
Our team had to learn to embrace what I called “live site first” culture. The operational culture was as important as any key technology breakthrough.
Today Microsoft is on course to have its own $20 billion cloud business.
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.
Quarterly PC shipments were now around 70 million, while smartphone shipments were reaching over 350 million. This was bad news for Microsoft.
They came to Microsoft with big dreams, but it felt like all they really did was deal with upper management, execute taxing processes, and bicker in meetings.
It is the thing that comes most naturally. It is the inner voice. It’s what motivates and provides inner direction to apply your capability.
“design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
But 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.
Microsoft had led the PC Revolution by enabling the highest-volume, most-affordable computing devices. But Google, with its free Android operating system, found a way to undercut Windows, something we did not react to quickly enough.
But it was too late to regain the ground we had lost. We were chasing our competitors’ taillights. Months later, I would have to announce a total write-off of the acquisition as well as plans to eliminate nearly eighteen thousand jobs,
Reframe our opportunity for a mobile- and cloud-first world,
accelerate our innovation, we must rediscover our soul—our unique core.
“it will need to deliver some products that live up to the rhetoric.”
more I questioned what it was that had motivated us to create personal computers in the first place. What was the spirit behind the first line of code ever written for the BASIC
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
we must galvanize all of our resources around three interconnected ambitions.
First, we must reinvent productivity and business processes.
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
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
In his perceptive book, Culture, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote that the idea of culture is multifaceted, “a
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.
Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it. In my own life, it’s the language, routines, and mindset of my parents back in India and my immediate family in Seattle that helped form me and still guide me to this day.
Dr. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dr. Dweck’s research is about overcoming failures by believing you can.
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.
All of this meant separation at many levels: husband and wife; father and daughters; mother and son. We were maintaining two lives in two countries. Anu drove thousands of miles between Seattle and Vancouver in rain, snow, and darkness, and so did I on alternate weekends for five years.
I told my colleagues that I was not talking bottom-line growth. I was talking about our individual growth. We will grow as a company if everyone, individually, grows in their roles and in their lives.
We pulled the trigger on a $2.5 billion acquisition. Today Minecraft is one of the bestselling games of all time on the PC, Xbox, and mobile.
That’s a growth mindset, and it highlights individual empowerment—what one person or one team can do against the odds.
