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

by Satya Nadella

So it was no surprise to me that once Satya became Microsoft’s CEO, he immediately put his mark on the company. As the title of this book implies, he didn’t completely break with the past—when you hit refresh on your browser, some of what’s on the page stays the same. But under Satya’s leadership, Microsoft has been able to transition away from a purely Windows-centric approach. He led the adoption of a bold new mission for the company. He is part of a constant conversation, reaching out to customers, top researchers, and executives. And, most crucially, he is making big bets on a few key technologies, like artificial intelligence and cloud computing, where Microsoft will differentiate itself.

For the first exercise Dr. Gervais asked us if we were interested in having an extraordinary individual experience. We all nodded yes. Then he moved on and asked for a volunteer to stand up. Only no one did, and it was very quiet and very awkward for a moment. Then our CFO, Amy Hood, jumped up to volunteer and was subsequently challenged to recite the alphabet, interspersing every letter with a number—A1B2C3 and so forth. But Dr. Gervais was curious: Why wouldn’t everyone jump up? Wasn’t this a high-performing group? Didn’t everyone just say they wanted to do something extraordinary? With no phones or PCs to look at, we looked down at our shoes or shot a nervous smile to colleagues. The answers were hard to pull out, even though they were just beneath the surface. Fear: of being ridiculed; of failing; of not looking like the smartest person in the room. And arrogance: I am too important for these games. “What a stupid question,” we had grown used to hearing.

One night, during the thirty-sixth week of her pregnancy, Anu noticed that the baby was not moving as much as she was accustomed to. So we went to the emergency room of a local hospital in Bellevue. We thought it would be just a routine checkup, little more than new parent anxiety. In fact, I distinctly remember feeling annoyed by the wait times we experienced in the emergency room. But upon examination, the doctors were alarmed enough to order an emergency cesarean section. Zain was born at 11:29 p.m. on August 13, 1996, all of three pounds. He did not cry. Zain was transported from the hospital in Bellevue across Lake Washington to Seattle Children’s Hospital with its state-of-the-art Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Anu began her recovery from the difficult birth. I spent the night with her in the hospital and immediately went to see Zain the next morning. Little did I know then how profoundly our lives would change. Over the course of the next couple of years we learned more about the damage caused by asphyxia in utero, and how Zain would require a wheelchair and be reliant on us because of severe cerebral palsy. I was devastated. But mostly I was sad for how things turned out for me and Anu. Thankfully, Anu helped me to understand that it was not about what happened to me. It was about deeply understanding what had happened to Zain, and developing empathy for his pain and his circumstances while accepting our responsibility as his parents.

As part of this journey I also discovered the teachings of India’s most famous son—Gautama Buddha. I am not particularly religious, but I was searching and I was curious why so few people in India have been followers of Buddha despite his origins. 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. I distinctly remember how much the “permanence” of Zain’s condition bothered me in the early years of his life. 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. The computer scientist in me loved this compact instruction set for life.

Don’t get me wrong. I am anything but perfect and for sure not on the verge of achieving enlightenment or nirvana. It’s just that life’s experience has helped me build a growing sense of empathy for an ever-widening circle of people. I have empathy for people with disabilities. I have empathy for people trying to make a living from the inner cities and the Rust Belt to the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I have empathy for small business owners working to succeed. I have empathy for any person targeted with violence and hate because of the color of his or her skin, what they believe, or who they love. My passion is to put empathy at the center of everything I pursue—from the products we launch, to the new markets we enter, to the employees, customers, and partners we work with.

Of course, as a technologist, I have seen how computing can play a crucial role in improving lives. At home, Zain’s speech therapist worked with three high school students to build a Windows app for Zain to control his own music. Zain loves music and has wide-ranging tastes spanning eras, genres, and artists. He likes everything from Leonard Cohen to Abba to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and wanted to be able to flip through these artists, filling his room with whatever music suited him at any given moment. The problem was he couldn’t control the music on his own—he always had to wait for help, which can be frustrating for him and us. Three high school students studying computer science heard of this problem and wanted to help. Now Zain has a sens...

sensor on the side of his wheelchair that he can easily tap his head against to flip through his music collection. What freedom and happiness the empathy of three teenagers has brought to my son.

Our roles on the SLT started to change that day. Each leader was no longer solely employed by Microsoft, they had tapped into a higher calling—to employ Microsoft in pursuit of their personal passions to empower others. It was an emotional and exhausting day, but it set a new tone and put in motion a more unified leadership team. 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. Cultural transformation would be slow and trying before it would be rewarding.

In these pages, you will follow three distinct storylines. First, as prologue, I’ll share my own transformation moving from India to my new home in America with stops in the heartland, in Silicon Valley, and at a Microsoft then in its ascendancy. Part two focuses on hitting refresh at Microsoft as the unlikely CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s transformation under my leadership is not complete, but I am proud of our progress. In the third and final act, I’ll take up the argument that a Fourth Industrial Revolution lies ahead, one in which machine intelligence will rival that of humans. We’ll explore some heady questions. What will the role of humans become? Will inequality resolve or worsen? How can governments help? What is the role of multinational corporations and their leaders? How will we hit refresh as a society?

The combination of cloud computing, sensors, Big Data, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), mixed reality, and robotics foreshadows socioeconomic change ripped from the pages of science fiction. There is a wide and growing spectrum of debate about the implications of this coming wave of intelligent technologies. On the one hand, Pixar’s film WALL-E paints a portrait of eternal relaxation for humans who rely on robots for the hard work. But on the other, scientists like Stephen Hawking warn of doom.

After all, on that cold February day in 2014 when Microsoft’s board of directors announced that I would become CEO, I put the company’s culture at the top of our agenda. 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. Books are so often written by leaders looking back on their tenures, not while they’re in the fog of war. What if we could share the journey together, the meditations of a sitting CEO in the midst of a massive transformation? Microsoft’s roots, its original raison d’être, was to democratize computing, to make it accessible to everyone. “A computer on every desk and in every home” was our original mission. It defined our culture. But much has changed. Most every desk and home now have a computer, and most people have a smartphone. We had succeeded in many ways, but we also were lagging in too many other ways. PC sales had slowed and we were significantly behind in mobile. We were behind in search and we needed to grow again in gaming. We needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs. It was time to hit refresh.

And so let me start at the beginning—my own story. I mean, what kind of CEO asks such existential questions as why do we exist in the first place? Why are concepts like culture, ideas, and empathy so important to me? Well, my father was a civil servant with Marxist leanings and my mother was a Sanskrit scholar. While there is much I learned from my father, including intellectual curiosity and a love of history, I was always my mother’s son. She cared deeply about my being happy, confident, and living in the moment without regrets. She worked hard both at home and in the college classroom where she taught the ancient language, literature, and philosophy of India. And she created a home full of joy.

Even so, my earliest memories are of my mom struggling to continue her profession and to make the marriage work. She was the constant, steadying force in my life, and my father was larger than life. He nearly immigrated to the United States, a faraway place that represented opportunity, on a Fulbright fellowship to pursue a PhD in economics. But those plans were suddenly and understandably shelved when he was selected to join the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). It was early 1960s, and Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister following Gandhi’s historic movement, which had achieved independence from Great Britain. For that generation entering the civil service and being part of the birth of a new nation was a true dream come true. The IAS was essentially a remnant of the old Raj system left by the British to govern after the UK turned over control of the country in 1947. Only about a hundred young professionals per year were selected for the IAS, and so at a very young age my father was administering a district with millions of people. Throughout my childhood, he was posted in many districts across the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. I remember moving from place to place, growing up in the sixties and early seventies in old colonial buildings in the middle of nowhere with lots of time and space, and in a country being transformed.

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. Their contrasting messages were clear: My father wanted intellectual ambition for me, while my mother wanted me to be happy versus being captive to any dogma. My reaction? The only poster I really wanted was one of my cricketing hero, the Hyderabadi great, M. L. Jaisimha, famous for his boyish good looks and graceful style, on and off the field.

I had attended schools in many parts of India—Srikakulam, Tirupati, Mussoorie, Delhi, and Hyderabad. Each left its mark and has remained with me. Mussoorie, for example, is a northern Indian city tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas, around six thousand feet of elevation. Every time I see Mount Rainier from my home in Bellevue, I am always reminded of the mountains of childhood—Nanda Devi and Bandarpunch. I attended kindergarten at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. It is the oldest school for girls in India but they let boys attend kindergarten. By age fifteen, we had stopped moving and I entered Hyderabad Public School, which boarded students from all over India. I’m thankful for all the moves—they helped me adjust quickly to new situations—but going to Hyderabad was truly formative. In the 1970s, Hyderabad was out of the way, not at all the metropolis of 6.8 million people it is today. I really didn’t know or care about the world west of Bombay on the Arabian Sea, but attending boarding school at HPS was the best break I had in my life.

At HPS I belonged to the Nalanda, or blues house, which was named for an ancient Buddhist university. The whole school was multicultural: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs all living and studying together. The school was attended by members of the elite as well as by tribal kids who had come from the interior districts on scholarships. The chief minister’s son attended HPS alongside the children of Bollywood actors. In my dorm there were kids from every part of the Indian economic strata. It was an amazingly equalizing force—a moment in time worth remembering. The list of alumni today speaks to this success. Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe; Ajay Singh Banga, the CEO of MasterCard; Syed B. Ali, head of Cavium Networks; Prem Watsa, founder of Fairfax Financial Holdings in Toronto; parliament leaders, film stars, athletes, academics, and writers—all came from this small, out-of-the-way school.

By twelfth grade if you had asked me about my dream it was to attend a small college, play cricket for Hyderabad, and eventually work for a bank. That was it. Being an engineer and going to the West never occurred to me. My mom was happy with those plans. “That’s fantastic, son!” But my dad really forced the issue. He said, “Look, you’ve got to get out of Hyderabad. Otherwise you’ll ruin yourself.” It was good advice then, but few could predict that Hyderabad would become the technological hub it is today. It was hard to break from my circle of friends, but Dad was right. I was being provincial with my ambitions. I needed some perspective. Cricket was my passion, but computers were a close second. When I was fifteen, my father brought me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer kit from Bangkok. Its Z80 CPU had been developed in the mid-seventies by an engineer who left Intel, where he had been working on the 8080 microprocessor, which ironically was the chip Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to write the original version of Microsoft BASIC. The ZX Spectrum inspired me to think about software, engineering, and even the idea that personal computing technologies could be democratizing. If a kid in nowhere India could learn to program, surely anyone could.

flunked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) entrance exam, the holy grail of all things academic for middle-class kids growing up in India at that time. My father, who never met an entrance test he did not pass, was more amused than annoyed. But, luckily, I had two other options to pursue engineering. I had gotten into mechanical engineering at Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra and electrical engineering (EE) at Manipal Institute of Technology. I chose Manipal based on a hunch that pursuing EE was going to get me closer to computers and software. And fortuitously the hunch was right. Academically it put me on a pathway that would lead to Silicon Valley and eventually to Microsoft.

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.

After graduation, I had an opportunity to attend a prestigious industrial engineering institute in Bombay. I had also applied to a few colleges in the United States. In those days, the student visa was bit of a crapshoot, and frankly I was hoping it would be rejected. I never wanted to leave India. But as fate would have it, I got my visa and was again faced with some choices—whether to stay in India and do a master’s degree in industrial engineering or go to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee for a master’s degree in electrical engineering. A very dear friend from HPS was attending Wisconsin studying computer science, and so my decision was made. I entered the master’s in computer science program at Wisconsin. And I’m glad I did because it was a small department with professors who were invested in their students. I’m particularly thankful to then department chair Dr. Vairavan and my master’s advisor Professor Hosseini for instilling in me the confidence not to pursue what was easy, but to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in computer science. If someone had asked me to point to Milwaukee on a map I could not have done it. But on my twenty-first birthday, in 1988, I flew from New Delhi to Chicago O’Hare Airport. From there a friend drove me to campus and dropped me off. What I remember was the quiet. Everything was quiet. Milwaukee was just stunning, pristine. I thought, god, this place is heaven on earth. It was summer. It was beautiful, and my life in the Un...

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. B...

But the Russians were unaffected by winter’s chill, and they just kept on puffing away.

Like many others, it was my great fortune to benefit from the convergence of several tectonic movements: India’s independence from British rule, the American civil rights movement, which changed immigration policy in the United States, and the global tech boom. Indian independence led to large investments in education for Indian citizens like me. In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act abolished the nation-of-origin quota and made it possible for skilled workers to come to America and contribute. Before that, only about a hundred Indians were allowed to immigrate each year. Writing for The New York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the immigration act, historian Ted Widmer noted that nearly 59 million people came to the United States as a result of the act. But the influx was not unrestrained. The act created preferences for those with technical training and those with family members already in the States. Unknowingly, I was the recipient of this great gift. These movements enabled me to show up in the United States with software skills just before the tech boom of the 1990s. Talk about hitting the lottery.

Over the summer I had been recruited to join Microsoft as a twenty-five-year-old evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system that was designed to extend the company’s popular consumer program into much more powerful business systems. A few years later NT would become the backbone of future Windows versions. Even today’s generation of Windows, Windows 10, builds on the original NT architecture. I had heard of NT while working at Sun but had never used it. A colleague had attended a Microsoft conference where they showed off NT to developers. He came back and told me about the product. I thought, wow, this is going to get serious. I wanted to be in a place that would have real impact. The guys who had recruited me to Microsoft, Richard Tait and Jeff Teper, said they needed someone who understood UNIX and 32-bit operating systems. I was a little unsure. What I really wanted to do was go to business school. I knew that management would complement my engineering training, and I had been thinking about a switch to investment banking. I had gotten into the full-time program at University of Chicago, but Teper said, “You should just join us straightaway.” I decided to do both. I was able to switch my admission to the part-time program at Chicago, but then never told anyone that I was flying to Chicago for weekends. I finished my MBA in two years and was glad I did.

It was now clear to us that Anu’s return to the United States would be very difficult given the visa waitlist for spouses of permanent residents. Microsoft had an immigration lawyer who told me it would take five or more years to get Anu into the country under existing rules. I contemplated quitting Microsoft and returning to India. But our lawyer, Ira Rubinstein, said something interesting. “Hey, maybe you should give up your green card and go back to an H1B.” He was suggesting that I give up permanent residency and instead reapply for temporary professional worker status. If you’ve seen the Gerard Depardieu film Green Card, you know the comedic lengths people will go to to obtain permanent residency in the United States. So why would I give up the coveted green card for temporary status? Well, the H1B enables spouses to come to the United States while their husbands and wives are working here. Such is the perverse logic of this immigration law. There was nothing I could do about it. Anu was my priority. And that made my decision a simple one. I went back to the U.S. embassy in Delhi in June of 1994, past the enormous lines of people hoping to get a visa, and told a clerk that I wanted to give back my green card and apply for an H1B. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. I said something about the crazy immigration policy, he shook his head and pushed a new form to me. “Fill this out.” The next morning, I returned to apply for an H1B application. Miraculously, it all worke...

The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. 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.

There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join. “You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.

Ultimately, Bing would prove to be a great training ground for building the hyper-scale, cloud-first services that today permeate Microsoft. We weren’t just building Bing, we were building the foundational technologies that would fuel Microsoft’s future. Building Bing taught us about scale, experimentation-led design, applied ML, and auction-based pricing. These skills are not only mission critical at our company, but highly sought after throughout today’s technology universe.

At some point during my time at Bing, I met with the Red Dog team to explore how we might work together. I quickly realized that Microsoft’s storied server and tools business (STB), where products like Windows Server and SQL Server had been invented and built and where Red Dog was housed, was worlds apart from Bing. STB was Microsoft’s third largest group by revenue after Office and Windows. They were the deep distributed systems experts. But when I contrasted STB with Bing a few things were apparent. They lacked the feedback loop that comes from running an at-scale cloud service. I realized that they were caught up in the local maxima of servicing their existing customer base and were not learning fast enough about the new world of cloud services. And the Red Dog team was a side effort that was ignored by the mainstream of the STB leadership and organization.

As a company, we’d been very publicly missing the mobile revolution, but we were not about to miss the cloud. I would miss working with colleagues at Bing, but I was excited to lead what I sensed would be the biggest transformation of Microsoft in a generation—our journey to the cloud. I had spent three years, from 2008 to 2011, learning the cloud—pressure-testing its infrastructure, operations, and economics—but as a user, not as a provider of the cloud. That experience would enable me to execute with speed in my new role.

Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices. One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.

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. But no one would follow him. He had the skills to get his men out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective. His team paid the ultimate price. I was determined not to make the same mistake.

The practical value of ML is immense and incredibly varied. Take a Microsoft customer like ThyssenKrupp, a manufacturer in the elevator and escalator business. Using Azure and Azure ML, they can now predict in advance when an elevator or escalator will need maintenance, virtually eliminating outages and creating new value for its customers. Similarly, an insurer like MetLife can spin up our cloud with ML overnight to run enormous actuarial tables and have answers to its most crucial financial questions in the morning, making it possible for the company to adapt quickly to dramatic shifts in the insurance landscape—an unexpected flu epidemic, a more-violent-than-normal hurricane season. Whether you are in Ethiopia or Evanston, Ohio, or if you hold a doctorate in data science or not, everyone should have that capability to learn from the data. With Azure, Microsoft would democratize machine learning just as it had done with personal computing back in the 1980s.

The cloud business taught me a series of lessons I would carry with me for years to come. Perhaps the most important is this: 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. It’s an art form, not a science. And a leader will not always get it right. But the batting average for how well a leader does this is going to define his or her longevity in business.

I knew they were hopeful but also skeptical. One had only to look at a few industry charts to see why. After decades of steady growth in worldwide PC shipments, sales had peaked and were now in decline. Quarterly PC shipments were now around 70 million, while smartphone shipments were reaching over 350 million. This was bad news for Microsoft. Every PC sold meant a royalty payment to Microsoft. To make matters worse, not only were PC sales soft, but so was interest in Windows 8, launched eighteen months earlier. Meanwhile Android and Apple operating systems were surging, reflections of the smartphone explosion that we at Microsoft had failed to lead and barely managed to participate in. As a result, Microsoft’s stock, long a blue-chip investment, had been treading water for years.

In an intense prep session two days before the announcement Jill and I sparred on how to inspire this disheartened group of brilliant people. In some ways, I was annoyed by what felt like lack of accountability and finger pointing. She stopped me mid-riff with “You’re missing it, they are actually hungry to do more, but things keep getting in their way.” Job one was to build hope. This was day one of our transformation—I knew it must start from within.

When the applause subsided, I wasted no time in calling my colleagues and teammates to action. “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.” If there was any one theme I wanted to emphasize that day, it was that we must discover what would be lost in the world if Microsoft just disappeared. We had to answer for ourselves, what is the company about? Why do we exist?

It might be easy to be motivated to change through envy. We could envy what Apple had built with its iPhone and its iPad franchise, or what Google had created with its low-cost Android phones and tablets. 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. We could also motivate ourselves through competitive zeal. 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.

There are many lessons a leader can take from the Nokia acquisition. Buying a company with weak market share is always risky. What we needed most was a fresh and distinctive approach to mobile computing. Where we went wrong initially was failing to recognize that our greatest strengths were already part of the soul of our company—inventing new hardware for Windows, making computing more personal, and making our cloud services work across any device and any platform. We should only be in the phone business when we have something that is really differentiated.

I knew that part of rediscovering the company’s soul was to bring Bill back, to engage him more deeply in the technical vision for our products and services. 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. While this exaggerated legend doesn’t exactly capture the culture I hoped to create, I knew that getting our founder back in the product-development loop would inspire our people and up our game.

There is that great closing scene in The Candidate when Robert Redford, having finally won the election, pulls his advisor into a room and asks, “What do we do now?” For starters, I decided to listen. Straightaway I heard from hundreds of employees at every level and in every part of the company. We held focus groups to allow people to share their opinions anonymously as well. Listening was the most important thing I accomplished each day because it would build the foundation of my leadership for years to come.

To my first question, why does Microsoft exist, the message was loud and clear. We exist to build products that empower others. That is the meaning we’re all looking to infuse into our work. I heard other things as well. Employees wanted a CEO who would make crucial changes, but one who also respected the original ideals of Microsoft, which had always been to change the world. They wanted a clear, tangible and inspiring vision. They wanted to hear more frequently about progress in transparent and simple ways. Engineers wanted to lead again, not follow. They wanted to up the coolness. We had technology the press would fawn over in Silicon Valley, such as leading-edge artificial intelligence, but we weren’t showing it off. What they really demanded was a road map to remove paralysis. For example, Google made headlines with glitzy demonstrations of their artificial intelligence experiments while we had world-class speech and vision recognition and advanced machine learning that we kept under wraps.

To make things real and drive fidelity of the ideas through an organization of 100,000-plus people operating across more than 190 countries we developed a clear connection between our mission and our culture. We defined our mission, worldview, ambitions, and culture in one page—no small feat for a company that loves massive PowerPoint decks. That was the relatively easy part. The harder part was to not tweak it—to let it stand. I’d want to edit a word here or there, add a row, just tinker with it before each speech. Then, I’d be reminded again “consistency is better than perfection.”

The work in these first few years of my tenure was all about getting the flywheel of change spinning. Sure, it took regular communications, but it also took discipline and consistency on my part and that of the senior leadership team. We needed to inspire and drive change. We challenged ourselves, “At the end of the next year if we were tried in a court of law and the charge was that we failed to pursue our mission, would there be enough evidence to convict us?” Just saying interesting things wasn’t enough. I, all of us, had to do them. And our employees had to see how everything we did reinforced our mission, ambitions, and culture. And then they needed to start doing the same.

I wrote that productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets, and slides. We will obsess over helping people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data, and social networks. We will build software to be more predictive, personal, and helpful. We will think about customers as “dual users,” people who use technology for their work, their school, and their personal digital life. In the email I inserted the image of a target and in its center appeared the words, “digital work and life experiences,” surrounded by our cloud platform and computer devices. Soon there will be 3 billion people connected to the Internet, sensors, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Yes, PC sales were slowing, and so we needed to convert Nietzsche’s “courage in the face of reality” into “courage in the face of opportunity.” We needed to win the billions of connected devices, not fret about a shrinking market.

Over time these changes meant that some executives left. They were all talented people, but the senior leadership team needed to become a cohesive team that shared a common worldview. For anything monumental to happen—great software, innovative hardware, or even a sustainable institution—there needs to be one great mind or a set of agreeing minds. I don’t mean yes-men and yes-women. Debate and argument are essential. Improving upon each other’s ideas is crucial. I wanted people to speak up. “Oh, here’s a customer segmentation study I’ve done.” “Here’s a pricing approach that contradicts this idea.” It’s great to have a good old-fashioned college debate. But there also has to be high-quality agreement.

Perhaps the most important thing we did during the experimental retreat was engage the leaders in more open and honest dialogue about our cultural evolution. Kathleen Hogan, our Chief People Officer and my partner in this endeavor, knew we needed to get this group’s feedback and buy-in. So after a long day of visiting customers in the Seattle area and driving back into the mountains, people were again divided into seventeen random groups of about ten each. They were then pointed to dinner tables with the assignment to share their own account of where the company’s culture stood and their ideas on how to evolve it. Some of us guessed this exercise would be futile—a cute nod to leader engagement. We figured these leaders would be tired. They’d be persnickety. They’d want to congregate back with their own friends. They’d say culture was my job or HR’s job. We were dead wrong. Discussions went long into the evening as the broader executive team gained a common understanding of what others experienced in leading their own teams, and brainstormed ways to create the culture we all aspired to have.

By the summer of 2015 our leadership team was really coming together and the company was beginning to see momentum. Windows 10, which would be our most ambitious version ever, was nearing launch. The launch of Surface Pro 3 would prove that consumers and businesses alike wanted a tablet that could replace their laptop. We delivered Office for all devices, including the iPhone, and our cloud-based O365 added nearly 10 million subscribers. Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform that competes with Amazon, was growing rapidly. In the months that followed my email to all employees, our leadership team had refined the thinking in that memo and had decided we would affirmatively change the company’s mission statement. Our transformation was under way, though we still had a long way to go.

Every weekend I would call my mom and talk to her. Since I was traveling that Saturday, I decided to call her before getting on the plane. It was Ugadi, New Year’s Day for our region of India. I had not realized that, so my mom reminded me and wished me a happy New Year. It was a brief call since I was late to get to the airport, and we talked briefly about the week and all that was going on. We ended the call as usual with her asking me if I was happy with what I was doing and me assuring her that I was. What a blessing because two hours before landing I received a worrisome email from Anu back home asking if I had landed. I sensed something was wrong and after some back-and-forth learned that my mother had unexpectedly passed away.

A computer on every desk and in every home, which Bill and Paul had introduced forty years earlier as the company’s mission, was actually more of a goal—an inspiring one for its era. The more I thought about it, the 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 interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people. And that was still what motivated all of our efforts: 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 on the American West Coast, but everyone on the planet. Helping people and their organizations achieve more is our sweet spot. That’s what informs our decisions and inspires our passion; it’s also what makes us different from other companies. We make things that help other people make things and make things happen.

Rediscovering the soul of Microsoft, redefining our mission, and outlining the business ambitions that would help investors and customers grow our company—these had been my priorities with the first inkling that I would become CEO. Getting our strategy right had preoccupied me from the beginning. But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” As I concluded my talk that morning in Orlando, I focused on what would be our grandest endeavor, the highest hurdle—transforming the Microsoft culture.

My wife wasn’t thinking of my success when she gave me Dr. Dweck’s book. She was thinking of the success of one of our daughters who has learning differences. Her diagnosis took us on a journey of discovery to help her. First was the internal journey, concern for her but also the need to educate ourselves. Next came action. We found a school in Vancouver, Canada, that specializes in learning differences like hers. We spent five years of our lives splitting time and family between Vancouver and Seattle in order to augment her regular schooling while keeping Zain’s care consistent in Seattle. 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.