November 5, 2017 (page 66)
“After decades of steady growth in worldwide PC shipments, sales had peaked and were now in decline. ”
November 5, 2017 (page 66)
“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”
November 5, 2017 (page 66)
“The company was sick. Employees were tired. They were frustrated. They were fed up with losing and falling behind despite their grand plans and great ideas.”
November 5, 2017 (page 67)
“Job one was to build hope. This was day one of our transformation—I knew it must start from within.”
November 5, 2017 (page 68)
“One of my favorite books is Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine about another tech company, Data General, in the 1970s. In it, Kidder teaches us that 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. And so what is soul in this context of a company? I don’t mean soul in a religious sense. It is the thing that comes most naturally. It is the inner voice. It’s what motivates and provides inner direction to apply your capability. What is the unique sensibility that we as a company have?”
November 5, 2017 (page 69)
“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.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products.”
November 5, 2017 (page 69)
“How many organizations can say they achieved their founding mission? There is no way I would become CEO of a Fortune 500 company if it was not for the democratizing force of Microsoft all over the world. But the world had changed, and it was time for us to change our view of the world.
Worldview is an interesting term, rooted in cognitive philosophy. Simply put, it is how a person comprehensively sees the world—across political, social, and economic borders. What are the common experiences we all share? ”
November 5, 2017 (page 70)
“I simplified all of this and encouraged Microsoft to become “mobile-first and cloud-first.” Not PC-first or even Phone-first.”
November 5, 2017 (page 71)
“In 2008, the Linux-based Android smartphone gobbled up market share and today it runs on more than one billion activated devices.
Looking back, the Nokia deal announced in September 2013, five months before I would become CEO, became another painful example of this loss. We were desperate to catch up after missing the rise of mobile technology. ”
November 5, 2017 (page 72)
“A few months after I became CEO, the Nokia deal closed, and our teams worked hard to relaunch Windows Phone with new devices and a new operating system that came with new experiences. But it was too late to regain the ground we had lost. We were chasing our competitors’ taillights. Months later, I would have to announce a total write-off of the acquisition as well as plans to eliminate nearly eighteen thousand jobs, the majority of them because of the Nokia devices and services acquisition. ”
November 5, 2017 (page 73)
“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”
November 5, 2017 (page 75)
“Over the first several months of my tenure, I devoted a lot of time to listening, to anyone and everyone just as I had promised to do in that Thanksgiving memo to the board.”
November 5, 2017 (page 75)
“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.”
November 5, 2017 (page 77)
“My first title at Microsoft had been “evangelist,” a common term in technology for someone who drives a standard or product to achieve critical mass. Now here I was evangelizing the notion that we needed to rediscover our soul. The mission of a company is in many ways a statement about its soul, and that’s where I went first.”
November 11, 2017 (page 80)
“One of my favorites was to challenge conventional thinking more. Why is Xbox a box since traditional television and cable boxes are fading? What if Kinect, our”
November 11, 2017 (page 80)
“motion-sensing technology used for video games and robotics, came with wings or wheels so it could go fetch lost keys or wallets? Many wrote to me to say that after years of frustration they felt a new energy.”
November 11, 2017 (page 81)
“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. We needed a senior leadership team (SLT) that would lean into each other’s problems, promote dialogue, and be effective.”
November 11, 2017 (page 86)
“Every year in July some fifteen thousand customer-facing Microsoft employees gather for a global summit to hear the latest strategies and initiatives and to see demos of new tech products in development. The gathering would be my opportunity to update employees on our progress and enroll them in the changes under way.”
November 11, 2017 (page 87)
“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”
November 11, 2017 (page 87)
“first line of code ever written for the BASIC interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people.”
November 11, 2017 (page 87)
“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.”
November 11, 2017 (page 90)
“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.”
November 11, 2017 (page 93)
“As I continued my speech at the global sales conference, the empathy I felt for my kids and the empathy I felt for the people listening in that audience were on my mind and in my emotions.
“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.”
November 11, 2017 (page 94)
“I told my colleagues that I was not talking bottom-line growth. I was talking about our individual growth. We will grow as a company if everyone, individually, grows in their roles and in their lives. My wife, Anu, and I had been blessed with wonderful children, and we’ve had to learn their special needs. That has changed everything for us. “It’s taken me on this journey of developing more empathy for others.”
Notes From: Satya Nadella. “Hit Refresh.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/hit-refresh/id1128878569?mt=11
