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

by Satya Nadella

do have a bias for which I am unapologeti...

for driving investment toward technological advancements in services like LinkedIn and Office that help people create, connect, and become more productive rather than software that is simply entertaining—memes for conspicuous consumption. Spillover effects on the economy are pretty limited for technologies that don’t foster a more equitable ratio of consumption to crea...

Robert Gordon’s recent economic treatise, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, has as its central thesis that some inventi...

John Batelle, Wired’s co–founding editor, once wrote that “Business is humanity’s most resilient, iterative, and productive mechanism for creating change in the world.” He is right—and we business leaders need to take seriously our responsibilities as change leaders.

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.

Economist Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence, writes that the origin of today’s anti-globalization sentiment in the wealthiest nations lies in the fact that their share of world income has plummeted from 70 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in just the past two decades. In other words, wealthy nations like the United States, France, Germany, and the UK have witnessed a large drop in their share of world income.

The combination of low wages and information technologies

that radically lowered the cost of moving ideas has meant that places like China and India have significantly gained in the share of world income while rich nations are now back to 1914 levels, igniting anti-globalization feelings in some quarters. Baldwin predicts a third wave of globalization will come when telepresence and telerobotics (like HoloLen...

Nobel economist Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, also a distinguished economist at Princeton, published a pa...

who have less than a college degree, experience cumulative disadvantages over the course of their lives that can negatively impact their mortality, health, and economic well-being. In fact, their research found that it is education more than income that explains increases in mortality and morbidity among whites in midlife. This dynamic, coupled with Baldwin’s findings, have at least in part fueled today’s anti-globali...

Microsoft is a company born in America. Our heritage has shaped our values. We believe in the American Dream—both in living it out as employees and helping others do the same. Our allegiance is to a set of enduring values—privacy, security, free speech, opportunity, diversity, and inclusion. We live by them, and we will stand for them when challenged in America and elsewhere.

Earlier I wrote that the C in CEO is about being the curator of culture. After all, it really comes down to people. It’s the sum of a million decisions made by thousands of people every day. It’s about helping employees live out their own personal mission in the context of Microsoft’s. Microsoft no longer employs people, people employ Microsoft. What is possible to achieve when we shift the mindset of more than 100,000 people from being employees to employers? Our entire purpose is to make

things that help others make things—and make things happen.

I’ve often said that the best lines of computer code are like

poetry. The writer struggles to compress so much thought and feeling into the fewest lines possible while still communicating the fullness of expression. Although the prose we’ve written here does not approach poetry, the writing process was nonetheless intense, and in the end rewarding. For that, there are many people to thank.