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

by Satya Nadella

In the midst of these troubled times, a cartoonist drew the Microsoft organization chart as warring gangs, each pointing a gun at another. The humorist’s message was impossible to ignore. As a twenty-four-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me.

He didn’t grill me on my prior experiences or educational pedigree. 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.

Cricket attracts an estimated 2.5 billion fans globally, compared with just half a billion baseball fans.

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.

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.

Sure, I would get homesick, like any kid, but America could not have been more welcoming. I don’t think my story would be possible anywhere else, and I am proud today to call myself an American citizen.

Only in America would someone like me get the chance to prove himself rather than be typecast based on the school I attended.

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.

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.

was about 9 p.m., but the parking lot was packed. I’d expected to see a few stragglers finishing up their day but, no, the whole team was there working at their desks and eating take-out food. I didn’t really talk to anyone. But what I observed caused me to wonder: What gets people to work like this? Something important must be happening in Building 88.

Over time, Yahoo integrated Bing as its search engine, and together we powered a quarter of all U.S. searches. The search engine that many had said should be shuttered in its early days of struggle continued to win an expanding share of the market, and today it is a profitable multi-billion-dollar business for Microsoft.

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. It’s an insight that would serve me well when an even bigger set of challenges was presented to me as CEO.

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.

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

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.

when we are an inch apart on strategy at the leadership level, our product teams end up miles apart in execution.

But one aspect of the offsite really bugged me. Here we were with all this talent, all this bandwidth, and all this IQ in one place just talking at each other in the deep woods. And frankly, it seemed like most of the talking was about poking holes in each other’s ideas.

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

Because I’ve made culture change at Microsoft such a high priority, people often ask how it’s going. Well, I suppose my response is very Eastern: We’re making great progress, but we should never be done. It’s not a program with a start and end date. It’s a way of being.

Where are all the places today that I had a fixed mindset? Where did I have a growth mindset?

Fixed-mindset decisions are ones that reinforce the tendency to continue doing what we’ve always done.

an early president at Microsoft who had told me once that human resource systems are long-term efficient but short-term inefficient. In other words, over time you are rewarded and recognized for stellar work but not always in real time.

I told these high-potential leaders that once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavor, the whining is over. You can’t say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren’t enough good people, or I didn’t get the bonus. “To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit.”

In today’s era of digital transformation, every organization and every industry are potential partners.

there are four initiatives every company must make a priority. The first is engaging their customer base by leveraging data to improve the customer experience. Second, they must empower their own employees by enabling greater and more mobile productivity and collaboration in the new digital world of work. Third, they must optimize operations, automating and simplifying business processes across sales, operations, and finance. Fourth, they must transform their products, services, and business models.

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.

That’s the classic innovator’s dilemma—to risk existing success while pursuing new opportunities. Historically, Microsoft has struggled at times to get this balance right. We actually had a tablet before the iPad; we were well along the path toward an e-reader before the Kindle. But in some cases our software was ahead of the key components required for success, such as touchscreen hardware or broadband connectivity. In other cases, we lacked end-to-end design thinking to bring a complete solution to market. We also got a bit overconfident in our ability to fast-follow a competitor, forgetting that there is inherent risk in such a strategy. We were perhaps timid in disrupting our own highly successful business models. We’ve learned from all this. There is no formula to inventing the future. A company has to have a complete vision for what it can uniquely do, and then back it up with conviction and the capability to make it happen.

Alex is very philosophical and turned to Nietzsche for direction: “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’”

It’s estimated that in the 1450s there were only about thirty thousand books in Europe—each one handcrafted by someone working in a monastery. The Gutenberg Bible was the first book produced using movable type technology, and within fifty years the number of books grew to an estimated 12 million, unleashing a renaissance in learning, science, and the arts.

Don’t imagine that one day a quantum computer will take the form of a new stand-alone, super-fast PC that will sit on your desk at work. Instead, a quantum computer will operate as a coprocessor, receiving its instructions and cues from a stack of classical processors. It will be a hybrid device that sits in the cloud and accelerates highly complex calculations beyond our wildest dreams. Your AI agent, acting on your behalf, might tackle a problem for which there are a billion graphs to check by using a quantum computer that can scan those billion possibilities and come back to you instantly with just a few choices.

Ultimately, we need technological breakthroughs to drive growth beyond what we’re seeing, and I believe mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing are the type of innovations that will serve as accelerants.