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

by Satya Nadella

Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind.

Each week my senior leadership team (SLT) meets to review, brainstorm, and wrestle with big opportunities and difficult decisions.

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.

“Imagine you see a baby laying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” he asked.

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

to employ Microsoft in pursuit of their personal passions to empower others. It

The mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh—to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose.

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

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.

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.

In Japan, crowd-sourced data collected from hundreds of sensors nationwide helped the public monitor radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant to reduce risks to food quality and transportation. The 13 million measurements from five hundred remote sensors generated a heat map that alerted authorities to threats to local rice production.

I realized that in a successful company it is as important to unlearn some old habits as it is to learn new skills.

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

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.”

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

Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Culture is made up of acts that become habitual and accrue to something coherent and meaningful.

overcoming failures by believing you can. “The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” She divides the world between learners and non-learners, demonstrating that a fixed mindset will limit you and a growth mindset can move you forward.

empathy is essential to deal with problems everywhere, whether at Microsoft or at home; here in the United States or globally. That is also a mindset, a culture.

“We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture. And to me that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. In fact, the phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is ‘growth mindset,’ because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude—that mindset—of being able to overcome any constraint, stand up to any challenge, making it possible for us to grow and, thereby, for the company to grow.”

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

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.

Trust has many other components as well—respect, listening, transparency, staying focused, and being willing to hit reset when necessary. We have got to be principled about it.

Sometimes it’s critical to look at an existing relationship with a fresh set of eyes. A strategy that failed in the past might work in the future. Technology changes. The business environment changes. People change. It’s a mistake to write off any relationship as a lost cause. Tomorrow always begins with a chance to create new opportunities.

three Cs—do we have an exciting concept, do we have the capabilities necessary to succeed, and a culture that welcomes these new ideas and approaches?

“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.”

E + SV + SR = T/t Empathy + Shared values + Safety and Reliability = Trust over time

∑ (Education + Innovation) × Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth

His estimates suggest that, on average, each additional industrial robot reduces employment by about three workers. This suggests that, without any countervailing changes, the spread of industrial robots could have very adverse consequences for jobs and wages.

“The creation of new complex tasks always increases wages, employment and share of labor. But when automation runs ahead of the process of creation of new, labor-intensive tasks, technological change will bring lower employment.”