Hit Refresh

by Satya Nadella

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.

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.

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

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.

Traditional software design mapped out what developers thought a product should look like in a year’s time, when it would finally go to market. Modern software design involves online products updated through continuous experimentation.

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

Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.

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

Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company.

In the face of global economic and technological uncertainty, we reset our mission, reprioritized our culture, and built or rebuilt strategic partnerships in order to solidify the foundation of our business.

In their first report, Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030, the study panel noted that AI and robotics will be applied “across the globe in industries struggling to attract younger workers, such as agriculture, food processing, fulfillment centers and factories.” The report found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind. “No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely to be developed in the near future.”

While there is no clear road map for what lies ahead, in previous industrial revolutions we’ve seen society transition, not always smoothly, through a series of phases. First, we invent and design the technologies of transformation, which is where we are today. Second, we retrofit for the future. We’ll be entering this phase shortly. For example, drone pilots will need training; conversion of traditional cars into autonomous vehicles will require redesign and rebuilding. Third, we navigate distortion, dissonance, and dislocation. This phase will raise challenging new questions. What is a radiologist’s job when the machines can read the X-ray better? What is the function of a lawyer when computers can detect legal patterns in millions of documents that no human can spot?

Today we don’t think of aviation as “artificial flight”—it’s simply flight. In the same way, we shouldn’t think of technological intelligence as artificial, but rather as intelligence that serves to augment human capabilities and capacities.

In my quest for an answer, I invited Dartmouth economist Diego Comin to spend an afternoon with me at my office in Redmond, Washington. Professor Comin is soft-spoken and weighs his words carefully, relying on the precision and thoroughness of his knowledge to carry conviction.

He has painstakingly studied the evolution of technology diffusion over the last two centuries in countries throughout the world. Comin and economist Bart Hobijn spent years producing the Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT)

Economist Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence, writes that the origin of today’s anti-globalization sentiment in the wealthiest nations lies in the fact that their share of world income has plummeted from 70 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in just the past two decades. In other words, wealthy nations like the United States, France, Germany, and the UK have witnessed a large drop in their share of world income. The combination of low wages and information technologies that radically lowered the cost of moving ideas has meant that places like China and India have significantly gained in the share of world income while rich nations are now back to 1914 levels, igniting anti-globalization feelings in some quarters. Baldwin predicts a third wave of globalization will come when telepresence and telerobotics (like HoloLens)—really good substitutes for people crossing borders to provide services—become affordable.