New Microsoft chief Nadella on Gates, leadership and replacing Steve Ballmer<\/h1>\n
PUBLISHED: 21 FEB 2014 07:45:19\u00a0| UPDATED: 22 FEB 2014<\/p>\n
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Satya Nadella (centre) says he has learned lots for lessons from Bill Gates (l) and Steve Ballmer (r) as he settles into the top job at Microsoft\u00a0Photo: Reuters<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\nADAM BRYANT<\/p>\n
This interview with Satya Nadella, the new chief executive of Microsoft, was conducted and condensed by the New York Times.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: \u201cWhat do you think? How am I doing?\u201d Then he said: \u201cLook, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don\u2019t have to ask me, \u2018How am I doing?\u2019 At your level, it\u2019s going to be fairly implicit.\u201d<\/p>\n
I went on to ask him, \u201cHow do I compare to the people who had my role before me?\u201d And Steve said: \u201cWho cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you\u2019ve been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark.\u201d The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>And what about Bill Gates?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He\u2019s always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he\u2019ll find some logical flaw in something I\u2019ve shown him. I\u2019ll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn\u2019t see something? In the beginning, I used to say, \u201cI\u2019m really intimidated by him.\u201d But he\u2019s actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He\u2019ll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he\u2019ll be the first person to say, \u201cOh, you\u2019re right.\u201d Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>There\u2019s a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you.<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0The outside world looks at it and says, \u201cWhoa, this is some new thing.\u201d But we\u2019ve worked closely for about nine years now. So I\u2019m very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, \u201cO.K., I\u2019ll put more energy into this.\u201d And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energised to bring their \u201cA\u201d game. It\u2019s just a gift.<\/p>\n
Q.\u00a0<\/b>What were some early leadership lessons for you?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0I played on my school\u2019s cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler; like a pitcher in baseball — and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again.<\/p>\n
I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn\u2019t put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you\u2019re leading.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>Tell me about your management approach in your new role.<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0The thing I\u2019m most focused on today is, how am I maximising the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn\u2019t have some fantastic attributes. I\u2019m only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person\u2019s capabilities to the benefit of our organisation?<\/p>\n
Q.\u00a0<\/b>Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified \u201cone Microsoft\u201d culture. How are you going to do that?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0One thing we\u2019ve talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what\u2019s the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That\u2019s really the job.<\/p>\n
Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimising, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organisational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times.<\/p>\n
So how do you create that self-organising capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it\u2019s not. It\u2019s just an absolute dud until it\u2019s a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $US70 billion business, something that\u2019s $US1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $US1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing.<\/p>\n
To me, that is perhaps the big culture change — recognising innovation and fostering its growth. It\u2019s not going to come because of an org chart or the organisational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organisational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>How do you hire? What questions do you ask?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I\u2019ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.<\/p>\n
I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you\u2019ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, \u201cWow, I really did that.\u201d And then, what\u2019s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn\u2019t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?<\/p>\n
Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you\u2019re not learning. And if you\u2019re not learning, you\u2019re not going to do useful things in the future.<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b>What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, \u201cThis is how we used to do it.\u201d Or if somebody who\u2019s been here for a while says, \u201cThis is how we do it.\u201d Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards?<\/p>\n
Q.<\/b><\/b>Any final big-picture thoughts on how you\u2019re going to approach your new role, and how you want to make your mark?<\/i><\/p>\n
A.<\/b>\u00a0Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it\u2019s more about reinvention. We\u2019ve had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It\u2019s going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.<\/p>\n
One of the things that I\u2019m fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilisations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year old companies. For us to be a 100-year old company where people find deep meaning at work, that\u2019s the quest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Q.How do you hire? What questions do you ask? A.\u00a0I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners … Continue reading New MSFT chief on hiring approach<\/span>