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

by Satya Nadella

My personal philosophy and my passion, developed over time and through exposure to many different experiences, is to connect new ideas with a growing sense of empathy for other people. Ideas excite me. Empathy grounds and centers me.

Filosofia de Satya Nadella

Today it’s hard to imagine devices that are not connected to the cloud.

#hitrefresh

Steve Jobs understood what the soul of a company is. He once said that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products.

El espiritu de apple

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

Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is.

good

“To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”

Leaders need to inspire optimism, creativity, shared commitment, and growth through times good and bad. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work.

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?

A strategy that failed in the past might work in the future. Technology changes.

“If you know how to paint with math and science, you can make anything,”

“You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.”

“He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.”

Free speech, privacy, security, and sovereignty are timeless, nonnegotiable values.

The battle between individual, timeless liberties like privacy and freedom of speech and public demands for safety and security was now at my door.

Philosopher Tom Beauchamp defines such a dilemma as a circumstance in which moral obligations demand or appear to demand that a person adopt each of two (or more) alternative actions, yet the person cannot perform all the required alternatives.

It is also a technology powerhouse that is leading the wave in cloud computing, but the Snowden case broke a crucial ingredient in cloud computing—trust.

Empathy + Shared values + Safety and Reliability = Trust over time

Trust in today’s digital world means everything.

So the mirror world of cyberspace has incredible potential both for good and for evil.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”