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.

He had one simple question. “Imagine you see a baby lying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” he asked. “You call 911,” I replied without much forethought. 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.”

Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves.

As a kid, I couldn’t have cared less about pretty much anything, except for the sport of cricket. One time, my father hung a poster of Karl Marx in my bedroom; in response, my mother hung one of Lakshmi, the Indian goddess of plentitude and contentment.

In his novel, Netherland, Joseph O’Neill describes the beauty of the game, its eleven players converging in unison toward the batsman and then returning again and again to their starting point, “a repetition or pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.”

I didn’t really have a specific plan for what I’d do after finishing my electrical engineering degree. 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.

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

On reflection, 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.

That is what leadership is about. It’s about bringing out the best in everyone. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of an individual and a team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.

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.

Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices.

In business school I had read Young Men and Fire, a book by Norman Maclean (best known for A River Runs Through It). It tells the story of a tragic forest fire that killed thirteen “smokejumpers” (parachuting firefighters) in 1949 and the investigation that followed. What I remembered was the lesson that went unheeded: the urgent need to build shared context, trust, and credibility with your team. The lead firefighter, who ultimately escaped the blaze, knew that he had to build a small fire in order to escape the bigger fire.

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.

One of my favorite books is Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine about another tech company, Data General, in the 1970s.

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

Reviewing a software product with Bill is the stuff of legend at Microsoft. In his comical 1994 novel, Microserfs, Douglas Coupland wrote a humorous sketch of Bill’s influence on a Microsoft programmer. A developer named Michael locks himself in his office at 11 a.m. after getting a flame mail from Bill who had reviewed some of his code. No one on his floor had ever been flamed by Bill personally. “The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous.” By 2:30 a.m., concerned about Michael, his team goes to the twenty-four-hour Safeway for “flat” food that can be slipped underneath his door.

Culture can be a vague and amorphous term. In his perceptive book, Culture, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote that the idea of culture is multifaceted, “a kind of social unconscious.” With razor precision, 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.

Earlier in the year, Anu had handed me a copy of Dr. Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. 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

The key to the culture change was individual empowerment. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen, and overestimate what others need to do for us.

We need to be willing to lean into uncertainty, to take risks, and to move quickly when we make mistakes, recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. Sometimes it feels like a bird learning to fly. You flap around for a while, and then you run around. Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is.

It’s been said we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the short run, but underestimate what can be achieved in the long run.

journalist Geoffrey Willans once said. “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.” Goethe went further. “He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.”

“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet,” the Danish Nobel physicist Niels Bohr once said.

an engaging TED talk, the British conductor Charles Hazelwood describes the critical importance of trust in leading an orchestra. A conductor’s instrument, of course, is the orchestra itself, and so when he raises the baton, he has to trust that the musicians will respond, and the musicians have to trust that he will create a collective environment within which each can do his or her best work. Based on this experience, Hazelwood speaks of trust as being like holding a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you will crush the bird; hold it too loosely, and it will fly away.

Today we don’t think of aviation as “artificial flight”—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.