Hit Refresh

by Satya Nadella

It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.

One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.

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.

technology is nothing more than the collective soul of those who build it. The technology is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the profound obsession of its designers.

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

I think of culture as a complex system made up of individual mindsets—the mindsets of those in front of me. Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it.

At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology. There is no way to do that unless we absorb with deeper insight and empathy what they need.

Learning to fly is not pretty but flying is.

Any advice that advocates passivity in the face of bias is wrong.

When it comes to humans, data is not perfect, but we can’t monitor what we can’t measure.

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

“He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’”

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.

“Consistency over time is trust.”

In Madison’s Music, civil liberties professor Burt Neuborne writes that “a poetic vision of the interplay between democracy and individual freedom is hiding in plain sight in the brilliantly ordered text and structure of the Bill of Rights, but we have forgotten how to look for it.”

“Isn’t that the point of creativity, to keep searching?”