Satya Nadella's word file

Book review of 'Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone'

Hit Refresh 

The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

Satya Nadella

HarperCollins

272 pages; Rs 599

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a tough act to follow, as much for other Valley tech entrepreneurs as for professionals who have succeeded him in his own company.

Satya Nadella was made Microsoft CEO in February 2014, a move that surprised most insiders, including him. One reason for the surprise could be that Mr Nadella’s personality is in stark contrast to his predecessor, Steve Ballmer. 

As part of the interview process one board member suggested to Mr Nadella that if he wanted to be CEO, he needed to be clear that he was hungry for the job. 

Mr Nadella says he even asked Mr Ballmer about it who laughed and said, “It’s too late to be different.” Mr Nadella concluded that it just wouldn’t be him to display that kind of personal ambition.

One of the first things Mr Nadella says he asked himself is “Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role?”

The CEO title came later but Mr Nadella’s journey to this point where he poses these questions is inspiring, albeit differently, to those aspiring to achieve success like him. And perhaps equally relevant are the contents of this book to parents hoping their children grow up to be Nadellas. 

Arguably he is an excellent role model, but that is not the way he or his parents intended it.

The son of an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer, the family got shunted around a fair bit. He attended schools in Srikakulam, Tirupati, Mussoorie, Delhi, and Hyderabad. He insists his mother was not a tiger mom and his father also largely let him be. “She never pressured me to do anything other than just be happy,” he says of her.

Mr Nadella says this suited him fine. He only cared about cricket, idolising the game and, of course, playing it as well. An interesting poster war broke out in his bedroom once. His father hung a poster of Karl Marx, his mother responded with one of Lakshmi, whereas he dreamt of M L Jaisimha, that dashing cricketer on and off field.

Unlike many high achievers, Mr Nadella flunked the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) exam. He did, however, get into the Birla Institute of Technology (BITS) in Mesra and electrical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology. He chose Manipal – not the first choice of many those days – because he felt electrical engineering would bring him closer to computers and software.

His father, he says, “who never met an entrance test he did not pass”, was more amused than annoyed that his son did not clear the prestigious IIT exams.

Later, faced with a choice of doing a masters in industrial engineering in India and one in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, he chose the latter as a dear friend from school – Hyderabad Public School – was in Wisconsin studying computer science.

Mr Nadella says he actually hoped his visa would be rejected because he never wanted to leave India. But his visa was accepted and thus it was that he landed in the US in 1988 in the quiet city of Milwaukee at the very cusp of the tech boom of the 1990s. “Talk about hitting the lottery,” he says.

Mr Nadella says his early lessons from cricket shaped his leadership style. “My approach has never been to conduct businesses as usual. Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible.”

 The word “empathy” figures throughout the book as an approach and a style. In his first interview at Microsoft, Mr Nadella recalls being asked, “Imagine you see a baby laying in the street and the baby is crying. What will you do?” His response “Call 911”.

His interviewer while walking out of the office told him, “You need some empathy, man. If a baby is lying on a street crying, pick up the baby.”

He got the job, though.

Mr Nadella says he learnt about empathy in a deeply personal way some years later when his first child, Zain, was born. Because of damage caused by utero asphyxiation, Zain would suffer from cerebral palsy, a condition that would change the lives of everyone around him.

Mr Nadella’s primary job as CEO was to convert a devices and services company into a cloud computing company, where Microsoft’s popular products would now be available virtually instead of necessarily sitting on your computer or PC. 

A massive challenge, because the cloud did not have any revenue while the big server and tools business paid everyone’s salary.

Mr Nadella details the challenges he faced and how we went about converting Microsoft into a cloud-first company, working with senior leadership, getting the right people in for the job. Today Microsoft is on course to have a $20-billion cloud business.

Mr Nadella’s book offers interesting insights – the part about technology, machine learning, artificial intelligence and how it is all coming together is interesting – but the more inspiring parts are to do with his soft personality, his ability to follow his instincts and not get swayed.

In the tough three-way war between Apple, Google (Android) and Microsoft over mobile operating systems, Mr Nadella says he never drove change through envy or competitive zeal. 

“The press loves that, but it’s not me. My approach is to lead with a sense of purpose and pride in what we do, not envy or combativeness,” he explains.