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February 2 - February 15, 2021
We should all be optimistic about what’s to come. The world is getting better, and progress is coming faster than ever.
when I was named Microsoft’s third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority. I told them I was committed to ruthlessly removing barriers to innovation so we could get back to what we all joined the company to do—to make a difference in the world.
I opened the meeting by asking everyone to suspend judgment and try to stay in the moment.
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.
I discovered Buddha did not set out to found a world religion. He set out to understand why one suffers. 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.
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. Cultural transformation would be slow and trying before it would be rewarding.
I said that we needed to rediscover the soul of Microsoft, our reason for being. I have come to understand that my primary job is to curate our culture so that one hundred thousand inspired minds—Microsoft’s employees—can better shape our future.
Summer became winter and the cold of Wisconsin is something to behold if you’ve come from southern India. I was a smoker at the time and all smokers had to stand outside. There were a number of us from various parts of the world. The Indian students couldn’t stand the cold so we quit smoking. Then my Chinese friends quit. But the Russians were unaffected by winter’s chill, and they just kept on puffing away.
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.
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.
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.
“Microsoft was founded based on a belief in the magic of software, and I’d say that opportunity today is stronger than it’s ever been. The magic of what we can do for people at work and at home with our software is totally in front of us.
“Our industry does not respect tradition. What it respects is innovation. It’s our collective challenge to make Microsoft thrive in a mobile-first and a cloud-first world.”
technology is nothing more than the collective soul of those who build it.
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.”
Microsoft is known for rallying the troops with competitive fire. The press loves that, but it’s not me. My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness.
“We live in a world of mobile technology, but it is not the device that is mobile. It is you.”
why does Microsoft exist, the message was loud and clear. We exist to build products that empower others.
Engineers wanted to lead again, not follow.
“consistency is better than perfection.”
We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.”
We needed to be aligned on mission, strategy, and culture.
What was the spirit behind the first line of code ever written for the BASIC interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people.
to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
We went from deflection to ownership of our future.
“The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.”
Our culture needed to be about realizing our personal passions and using Microsoft as a platform to pursue that passion.
The culture change I wanted was actually rooted in the Microsoft I originally joined. It was centered on exercising a growth mindset every day in three distinct ways. First, we needed to obsess about our customers. At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology.
It’s about questioning ourselves each day: Where are all the places today that I had a fixed mindset? Where did I have a growth mindset?
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.
I said earlier that culture can be a vague, amorphous term. That’s why we worked so carefully to define the culture we wanted. And it’s why we measure everything. When it comes to humans, data is not perfect, but we can’t monitor what we can’t measure. So, we routinely survey employees to take their pulse.
“To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”
The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you’ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise.
Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company. It’s insufficient to focus exclusively on your own unit. 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. And they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today.
Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions.
Steve Ballmer helped me deeply understand this with his three Cs. Imagine a target with three concentric rings. The outer ring is concepts. Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon may have an exciting product idea, but is that enough? An organization may have a conceptual vision—a dream or imagination filled with new ideas and new approaches, but do they have what’s in the second ring: capabilities? Do they have the engineering and design skills required to actually build that concept alone? And finally, the bull’s-eye, is a culture that embraces new concepts and new capabilities and doesn’t choke them
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Every company is becoming a digital company, and that process begins with infusing their products with intelligence.
Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.
It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes.
Empathy is a crucial ingredient in developing a product or a policy that will earn people’s trust.
Now it is our generation’s turn to design legal and regulatory systems that will discourage and punish the evil while encouraging the good to flourish—and to do so in a fashion that will enhance the overall level of trust in society as a whole.
In software development terms, AI is becoming a third run time—the next system on top of which programmers will build and execute applications. The PC was the first run time for which Microsoft developed applications like the Office suite of tools—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest. Today the Web is the second run time. In an AI and robotics world, productivity and communication tools will be written for an entirely new platform, one that doesn’t just manage information but also learns from information and interacts with the physical world.
“How do we make technology work for us, and not against us — especially
They want Silicon Valley satellites. Instead, they should be working on plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high-tech industries but in every economic sector.
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.
Based on this analysis, Comin agrees that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies.
