Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
Find the rose petals in a field of shit
What I’m stealing
The number one thing that leaders have to do is bolster the confidence of the people they’re leading
Consistency is better than perfection
The core of any business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs
Cultural change is not a program with a start and end date. It’s a way of being.
Learning about a shortcoming is a thrilling moment. The person who points it out has given the gift of insight
To be a leader, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit
Bring clarity to those you work with by synthesizing the complex. Take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it
Be the curator of culture
Opinion
I read this at the behest of a work mentor. Nothing revelatory, but I do appreciate how well Nadella is able to articulate and communicate his leadership philosophy. Definitely something to strive for in my own career.
I thought this was a unique and useful insight regarding how to position AI:
When history was made at Kitty Hawk, it was man with machine—not man against machine. 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.
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
I discovered Buddha did not set out to found a world religion. He set out to understand why one suffers. I learned that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence. (Location 185)
I knew that to lead effectively I needed to get some things square in my own mind—and, ultimately, in the minds of everyone who works at Microsoft. Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves. I worried that failing to ask these questions, and truly answer them, risked perpetuating earlier mistakes and, worse, not being honest. (Location 264)
My master’s thesis was about developing the best heuristics to accomplish complex graph coloring in nondeterministic polynomial time, or NP-complete. In other words, how can I solve a problem that has limitless possibilities in a way that is fast and good but not always optimal? Do we solve this as best we can right now, or work forever for the best solution? Theoretical computer science really grabbed me because it showed the limits to what today’s computers can do. It led me to become fascinated by mathematicians and computer scientists John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, and by quantum computing, which I will write about later as we look ahead to artificial intelligence and machine learning. And, if you think about it, this was great training for a CEO—nimbly managing within constraints. (Location 396)
The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation. (Location 538)
a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition. (Location 547)
third is the central importance of leadership. (Location 555)
It’s about bringing out the best in everyone. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of an individual and a team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading. (Location 562)
My approach has never been to conduct business as usual. Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible. (Location 567)
But it is impossible to be an empathetic leader sitting in an office behind a computer screen all day. 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. (Location 587)
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.” (Location 919)
I became convinced that the new CEO of Microsoft needed to do several things very well right away, during the first year. Communicate clearly and regularly our sense of mission, worldview, and business and innovation ambitions. Drive cultural change from top to bottom, and get the right team in the right place. Build new and surprising partnerships in which we can grow the pie and delight customers. Be ready to catch the next wave of innovation and platform shifts. Reframe our opportunity for a mobile- and cloud-first world, and drive our execution with urgency. Stand for timeless values, and restore productivity and economic growth for everyone. (Location 1010)
“consistency is better than perfection.” (Location 1025)
Amy helped to translate the mission and ambitions into language and goals investors needed to hear. She helped, for example, shape the goal to build a $20 billion cloud business, something investors grabbed on to and tracked quarter after quarter. It took us from a defensive frame amid falling PC and phone share to an offensive mindset. We went from deflection to ownership of our future. (Location 1186)
But as management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” (Location 1191)
Culture can be a vague and amorphous term. In his perceptive book, Culture, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton wrote that the idea of culture is multifaceted, “a kind of social unconscious.” With razor precision, he separates culture into four different meanings, but the most relevant for an organization is the values, customs, beliefs, and symbolic practices that men and women live and breathe each day. Culture is made up of acts that become habitual and accrue to something coherent and meaningful. (Location 1202)
Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it. (Location 1208)
we learned that 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. (Location 1228)
It takes deliberate work, and it takes some specific ideas about what the culture should become. It also requires dramatic, concrete actions that seize the attention of team members and push them out of their familiar comfort zones. (Location 1297)
First, we needed to obsess about our customers. 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 (Location 1306)
We need to be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that learning into Microsoft, while still innovating to surprise and delight our users. (Location 1310)
Second, we are at our best when we actively seek diversity and inclusion. (Location 1312)
Finally, we are one company, one Microsoft—not a confederation of fiefdoms. Innovation and competition don’t respect our silos, our org boundaries, so we have to learn to transcend those barriers. We are a family of individuals united by a single, shared mission. It is not about doing what’s comfortable within our own organization, it’s about getting outside that comfort zone, reaching out to do things that are most important for customers. (Location 1318)
I talked about these ideas every chance I got. (Location 1329)
And I looked for opportunities to change our practices and behaviors to make the growth mindset vivid and real. Part of the culture change was to give people the breathing room, the space, to bring their own voices and experiences to the conversation. The last thing I wanted was for employees to think of culture as “Satya’s thing.” I wanted them to see it as their thing, as Microsoft’s thing. (Location 1329)
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. (Location 1356)
When I learn about a shortcoming, it’s a thrilling moment. The person who points it out has given me the gift of insight. It’s about questioning ourselves each day: Where are all the places today that I had a fixed mindset? Where did I have a growth mindset? (Location 1358)
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.” (Location 1527)
The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you’ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise. I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to develop deep shared understanding within teams and define a course of action. Second, 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. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work. And they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today. Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions. (Location 1534)
One way to explain the logic is by turning to game theory, which uses mathematical models to explain cooperation and conflict. (Location 1589)
When I became CEO, I sensed we had forgotten how our talent for partnerships was a key to what made us great. (Location 1642)
Employees. Customers. Products. Partners. Each element needs time, attention, and focus if I’m going to create the value for which I am ultimately accountable. All four are important, and without discipline even the best managers can overlook one or more. Employees and products command attention every day, as they are closest to us; customers provide the resources we need to do anything, so they also command energy. But partners provide the lift we need to soar. They help us see around corners, help us locate new opportunities we might not see alone. (Location 1776)
reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. These technologies will inevitably lead to massive shifts in our economy and society. (Location 1796)
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space. David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation. (Location 1834)
The effect is transfer learning, and it’s seen not only in human intelligence but also (Location 1989)
But there are “musts” for humans, too—particularly when it comes to thinking clearly about the skills future generations must prioritize and cultivate. To stay relevant, our kids and their kids will need:
EMPATHY—Empathy, which is so difficult to replicate in machines, will be invaluable in the human-AI world. The ability to perceive others’ thoughts and feelings, to collaborate and build relationships will be critical. If we hope to harness technology to serve human needs, we humans must lead the way by developing a deeper understanding and respect for one another’s values, cultures, emotions, and drives.
EDUCATION—Some argue that because life spans will increase, birth rates will decline, and thus spending on education will decline as well. But I believe that to create and manage innovations we cannot fathom today, we will need increased investment in education to attain higher level thinking and more equitable education outcomes. Developing the knowledge and skills needed to implement new technologies on a large scale is a difficult social problem that will take a long time to resolve. The power loom was invented in 1785 but took thirty-five years to transform the clothing industry because of shortages of trained mechanics.
CREATIVITY—One of the most coveted human skills is creativity, and this won’t change. Machines will enrich and augment our creativity, but the human drive to create will remain central. In an interview, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri was asked why an author with such a special voice in English chose to create a new literary voice in Italian, her third language. “Isn’t that the point of creativity, to keep searching?”
JUDGMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY—We may be willing to accept a computer-generated diagnosis or legal decision, but we will still expect a human to be ultimately accountable for the outcomes. (Location 2615)
When history was made at Kitty Hawk, it was man with machine—not man against machine. 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. (Location 2661)
The most profound difference between leaders is whether they fear or embrace new technology. It’s a difference that can determine the trajectory of a nation’s economy. (Location 2713)
Are we growing, are we growing evenly, and what is the role of technology? There is, of course, no silver bullet, but as I consider all of the evidence and reflect on my own experiences, I keep returning to this simplified equation: ∑ (Education + Innovation) × Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth Education plus innovation, applied broadly across the economy and especially in sectors where the country or region has a comparative advantage, multiplied by the intense use of technology, over time, produces economic growth and productivity. (Location 2832)
Leaders at every level—from national to community-level—should foster not just fast but intense adoption of new technologies that can drive productivity. (Location 2852)
German system of vocational training through apprenticeship, which makes cutting-edge technologies available to the workforce quickly through vocational schools that have close relationships with industry. (Location 2868)
An inspiring idea in this context is the notion of a charter or startup city, an idea put forth by economist Paul Romer. (Location 2888)
The way I look at it, multinationals can no longer be the memes they’ve become—soulless, bloodless entities that enter a nation or a region simply to take rent from the locals. The job of a multinational is more important than ever. It needs to operate everywhere in the world, contributing to local communities in positive ways—sparking growth, competitiveness, and opportunity for all. How can we help our local partners and startups grow? How can we help the public sector become more efficient? How can we help solve the most pressing issues in society, like access to education and health? (Location 3005)
The priority of a global company should be to operate in each of these countries with the goal of creating local opportunity in long-term, sustainable ways. (Location 3010)
Finally, as leaders, what is our role? At the end of the day, leaders of any company are evaluated based on their ability to grow the business, to clear the way for innovations that inspire customers. As CEOs, we’re accountable for generating the best returns to shareholders. But I also subscribe to the notion that the bigger a company is, the more responsibility its leader has to think about the world, its citizens, and their long-term opportunities. (Location 3031)
the C in CEO is about being the curator of culture. (Location 3042)
This culture needs to be a microcosm of the world we hope to create outside the company. One where builders, makers, and creators achieve great things. (Location 3049)
Cornet, Manu. “Organizational Charts.” Bonkers World, June 27, 2011. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/. (Location 3096)
Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. (Location 3097)