Reading notes : Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella

Taking over one of the largest and path breaking software firms in the world, let alone transforming it, after it was lead by the legendary founder Bill Gates and the master marketer Steve Balmer, is no joke. Satya didn't have the customary "track record" of being the CEO of big firms nor had any previous stints at leading giant companies. I will lose sleep over just hearing the news of it, let alone putting myself in the shoes of Satya on the verge of becoming the CEO of Microsoft. None can be more curious to know more than myself on how did he manage it, how did he even take it especially when large clouds of concerns where looming around Microsoft and prevalent question around its relevance at the time of Cloud, Mobility and the world of co-creation and open source software platforms. Numerous questions came about on just thinking about this : How will he manage it? How will he secure the support of his long standing senior colleagues? How will he turn this behemoth around and make it relevant? Has Microsoft lost its "why?" (Simon Sinek's powerful idea of the purpose) and if so how will he recover? Unlike the influential and grandiloquent western CEO's, Satya with his academic and delivery background, and as a first generation Indian in the US,  how will he tackle this? Hundreds of such questions that came about and when this book was announced, I pre-ordered and looked for any book talks in this that's scheduled around Toronto. Thought I bought this book and I didn't get to read it until my vacation trip to Australia and New Zealand in Dec 2019. I found the book extremely enlightening and what I learnt reiterated the principles from the works by Simon Sinek ("Power of Why and purpose") and Malcolm Gladwell ("David and Goliath - about under dogs). As I usually do, I will go ahead and put down all the take away's and the points to ponder along with my musings around them. 

Across this book, I find that Satya's priority list goes like this - Employees, Customers and Products in that order which is what Simon Sinek has uncovered from all his works including "Leaders Eat Last". After Microsoft's turn around and it's accolades of being the best employer, this is a testimony on why employees of a company are their greatest assets and why the management should focus on them first than profit and shareholder's concerns. The fact that "empathy" is one of the core values that Satya is trying to instill in the culture, is very much evident on the latest products like Windows 10. I am a Windows 10 user and have recently upgraded to it and to date I haven't purchased a licensed version of it but Microsoft still lets me use it without much of nagging and the usability and user experience is extremely positive. I had several of my colleagues providing similar feedback on Microsoft Surface tablets.

I can't agree more on Satya's view point that this is the right time for the book on Microsoft's transformation and if its done as a Memoir it may not be relevant. I thought more around this and asked myself why Steve Job's biography  was relevant. I think it was because Steve Job's retirement was not a planned one but a forced one due to his illness. I expect another book on the lessons learnt from Satya's transformational efforts to turn around Microsoft after a few years. I learned "dotage" a new word which refers to the period of life when one's tired of age. I always think that one should seriously think and plan about how will one engage oneself during their dotage. While talking about his background Satya gives us all a glimpse of the state of equality in India, by expressing regrets over how his mom gave up her professional passion and aspirations as she supported the family. This is still the situation in many parts of India. I had a sense of delinquency as I didn't encourage my wife to pursue any profession or career.

Satya talks about how moving to different cities as a student had later helped him adopt to situtations and has given him a lot of exposure. This is profoundly true and having worked for TCS for more than 16 years and having served their multiple clients, I always see this as a great opportunity that only a consulting firm can give you - while being an employee of the same firm, you are exposed to multiple domains, technology platforms, organizational cultures and often local community cultures. Satya talks about a typical racial prototyping on Indians as if they are born to code, I see this differently and keep bringing this out while I talk to my colleagues and my team. The crux of Coding or Software programming is solving problems and the way Software development projects are executed, requires the developer to commit to or deliver to a fixed schedule (even in the Agile world, to be honest, though some SCRUM masters may challenge me). You cannot solve new problems very day on a schedule. Its common that you come across problems that are hard to solve within the agreed timeframe which requires to you to work additional hours. I think this is the key difference between manufacturing jobs and the IT ones and which is probably the reason why the IT workers are often paid handsomely. I also think that there is one other inherent advantage for Indian software developers which comes from the culture to this generation. This is the family support to consider "job first" and everything else is next. May be its because India is a developing economy and career is essential to maintain a decent life style for the family and career is always put first. I am not going into the debate on whether it is good or not but I want to record that such family support plays an important role on why Indian Software engineers are so successful.

When Satya talks about his early days in Microsoft, he acknowledges that "he was at the right place at the right time", which is what Malcom Gladwell called out as one of the advantage of super-successful people. One of the greatest lessons from Satya's early days from his Cricket games is how the captain takes up the challenge when the team member under performs and gives the team member a bigger challenge to rise up to the occasion. 

Satya reveals an interesting use case that a Greek university working with firefighters leveraging iOT and Cloud to predict cloud fires. Steve Balmer's early warning to Satya that it might be his last job if he fails. I am not sure if that's the right way to put it or whether a leader should do this to his team. Shouldn't you encourage your team member to take up additional responsibility and say if you fail doesn't matter we will work together to win again?? Satya says one of key things that he had to accomplish as he was taking over Microsoft was to "set a shared context" with the team which is nothing but "establishing and installing the sense of purpose". There is an important lesson and best practice from Microsoft's "live site first" culture - which is when a problem occurs, jump in and solve it but then do a serious Root cause analysis which will enable the team to learn from the past and ensure the issues faced are not repeated. I truly believe that if our system/culture ensures that an issue or problem occurred does not repeat itself, we will have a very stable business environment. One of the greatest take aways from the book is how a leader should see the external opportunities, internal capabilities and culture and all the connections among them.  

In one of the leadership lecture videos Simon Sinek narrates how Microsoft executives react vs how Apple executives react when talking about rival products. Microsoft executives are always on a competitive mode. Satya clearly has changed it and he says "our business strategy, if driven by our enemy, will also be negative and outer-directed. The true renewal should come within". Also he claims that Microsoft has become more customer focused and now have learnt to co-exist with their competitors and make them even partners. Regarding the growth mindset, Satya calls out that passion, toil and training will help us move forward. Satya calls out the influence of Sajay Parthasarathy in his career and I was fortunate to listen to Sanjay in one of the Microsoft TechEd Sessions in Bangalore and if I remember right he was the key note speaker.

Satya talks about Trust building as a consistency thing - you cannot build trust overnight with either employees or customers, this is the same concept Simon Sinek advocates repeatedly. Satya's mnetal model about how he allocates his time is another testimony to the ideas that Simon is spreading : Employees, Customers, Products and Partners (notice the order). He calls out these 3 as potential future transformational technology evolutions - Mixed Reality, AI and Qunatum Computing. I have used some apps that leverages some of it esp. Mixed Reality - e.g. Swift other than that I have had no exposure to these. I will spare more time to explore further on these technology topics in the coming months. I always wonder about how big companies pursue newer cutting edge tech trends and Satya explains it beautifully through the concept of "innovator's dilemma" and also explains the 3 C's(Concept, capability and culture) to help pursue the new ideas. I am coming across Friedrich Nietzsche for the first time as Satya introduces him through the Alex Kipman story. John Hamaker, the man behind Microsoft Cortana and his is "why" is awe-inspiring - "customers should feel that they can't live without Cortana, which saves them repeatedly" Finally Satya acknowledges that there are some jobs which will no longer be relevant in future in the world of AI, but the new world of automation will create numerous other jobs.