My wife wasn’t thinking of my success when she gave me Dr. Dweck’s book. She was thinking of the success of one of our daughters who has learning differences. Her diagnosis took us on a journey of discovery to help her. First was the internal journey, concern for her but also the need to educate ourselves. Next came action. We found a school in Vancouver, Canada, that specializes in learning differences like hers. We spent five years of our lives splitting time and family between Vancouver and Seattle in order to augment her regular schooling while keeping Zain’s care consistent in Seattle.
All of this meant separation at many levels: husband and wife; father and daughters; mother and son. We were maintaining two lives in two countries. Anu drove thousands of miles between Seattle and Vancouver in rain, snow, and darkness, and so did I on alternate weekends for five years. It was a trying time, but Anu and the girls made some exceptional friends in Canada. As a family, we learned together that these predicaments were universal. Families from California, Australia, Palestine, and New Zealand converged on the Vancouver school with issues and challenges. I discovered that recognition of these universal predicaments leads to universal empathy—empathy for and among children, adults, parents, and teachers. Empathy, we learned, was indivisible and was a universal value. And 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.
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.”
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. And what gives me deep meaning is that ability to take new ideas and empathy for people; to connect the two and have great impact. That’s what gives me the greatest satisfaction. It’s why I work for Microsoft. And that’s what I aspire for each one of you to do as you work here.”
Our culture needed to be about realizing our personal passions and using Microsoft as a platform to pursue that passion. For me, my greatest satisfaction has come from my passion to see technology become more accessible for people with disabilities and to help improve their lives in a myriad of ways.
Just as my predecessor Steve Ballmer had done at these annual gatherings, I’d closed my speech with a call to action, but one with a very different mood and purpose. I had essentially asked employees to identify their innermost passions and to connect them in some way to our new mission and culture. In so doing we would transform our company and change the world. When you’re CEO, these goals can be easy to imagine, but when an employee’s aperture is smaller—a marketer in Malaysia or technical support in Texas—such a mission can seem distant and unattainable. So the challenge I’d set forth in my speech might be a daunting one. I wondered whether I’d connected with the audience or left them baffled and untouched.
Feeling my emotions beginning to overcome me, I skipped my last slide and quickly exited the stage. Jill pointed at the doorway to the auditorium, not my private green room, “Watch with them.” As a video started presenting not just the year’s progress but the expansive, mission-driven opportunity ahead, I slipped back into the auditorium through a side entrance. No one could see me in the darkened auditorium. Every eye was glued to the screen, but I was watching them, gauging the emotion in the room. Everyone was locked in and some were softly wiping away tears. I knew then that we were onto something.
Chapter 4
A Cultural Renaissance
From Know-It-Alls to Learn-It-Alls
A few days later, I was in Nanyuki, Kenya, standing inside a solar-powered shipping container that doubles as an Internet café. One of our partners, Mawingu (Swahili for “cloud”) Networks, provides these rural communities with low-cost Internet services, which has opened up access to knowledge for schoolkids and parents alike. In fact, in just one short year educational test scores have dramatically increased.
Inside the café, I stopped to chat with Chris Baraka, who uses the connectivity here to make a living as a writer and teacher. I also observed farmers pausing from their outdoor work to check crop prices. With only a dozen people in attendance, one would never know that I was celebrating the global launch of Windows 10, a Microsoft product at the core of our strategy.
Two decades earlier, the launch of Windows 95, with its pricey theme song, “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, midnight retail parties, and media hysteria, had helped create a phenomenon of bigger and bigger software launches. Competitors tried to outdo and out-lavish each other’s launch events in hopes of sparking customer impulses to purchase. But that was then, and this is now. A refreshed product launch strategy, one that reflected the times and our new mission and culture, was needed. Initially our communications chief, Frank Shaw, had presented a first-class launch plan complete with visual extravaganzas like setting ablaze the Sydney Opera House with Windows-branded colorful lights. He felt the product needed these kinds of inspiring and hopefully media-attention-getting images in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and elsewhere in order to generate the news coverage we had come to expect. But the approach didn’t feel right. I felt that this was one of those moments to show a different Microsoft. We were struggling with what to do, and I decided to take a brief break from the meeting to get coffee. During that break, a side conversation among some of the team members rose above the chatter. “We should launch Windows 10 in Kenya.” Kenya is a country where we have customers, partners, and employees. It’s a nation with great promise, one that with digital transformation could leapfrog over others by getting infrastructure and skills in place.
The launch of Windows 10 wasn’t about one product; it was about our mission. And if we’re going to seek to empower every person on the planet, why not go to the other side of the planet and make that real? I walked down the hall to Frank’s office. “Let’s take a chance.” I knew that we had built a low-cost, high-speed Internet connectivity solution that leverages an innovative technology called “TV white space”—the unused broadband spectrum that exists in between television channels—to connect rural, poor areas like Nanyuki, Kenya, to the Web. We could show off not just Windows 10 but also its relevance to anyone and everyone, no matter their geography or socioeconomic status. Frank thought about it another minute and agreed. What better way to demonstrate our new mission and emerging culture than to be in eastern Africa, a region that exemplifies both the challenges and the opportunities for technology to transform and create economic growth? We might not get all of the TV cameras we used to get, but we’d be demonstrating our desire to understand every customer’s context, including that of farmers in a remote African village, for whom technology tools can mean the difference between abject poverty and hope. By embracing this new cultural mindset, we’d be able to start listening, learning more and talking less.
So what did this growth mindset reveal? One of the lessons we took back is that it’s too simplistic to call a country like Kenya a developing economy or the United States a developed one. Both countries have educated, tech-savvy customers capable of using our most sophist
icated products, and both countries have potential customers with little or no skills. Sure, there are higher concentrations of one or the other in each country, but it’s a false distinction simply to think of countries as either developed or developing. The Windows 10 launch in Kenya struck a far more global tone for the company, and it also taught us valuable lessons.
I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture. As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission. Creating that kind of culture is my chief job as CEO. And so, whether it was through public events like the launch of Windows 10 or through speeches, emails, tweets, internal posts, or monthly employee Q&A sessions, I planned to use every opportunity at my disposal to encourage our team to live this culture of dynamic learning.
Of course, exhortations from the CEO are only a fraction of what it takes to create real culture change, especially in a huge, very successful organization like Microsoft. An organizational culture is not something that can simply unfreeze, change, and then refreeze in an ideal way. 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.
Our culture had been rigid. Each employee had to prove to everyone that he or she knew it all and was the smartest person in the room. Accountability—delivering on time and hitting numbers—trumped everything. Meetings were formal. Everything had to be planned in perfect detail before the meeting. And it was hard to do a skip-level meeting. If a senior leader wanted to tap the energy and creativity of someone lower down in the organization, she or he needed to invite that person’s boss, and so on. Hierarchy and pecking order had taken control, and spontaneity and creativity had suffered as a result.
The culture change I wanted was actually rooted in the Microsoft I originally joined. It was centered on exercising a growth mindset every day in three distinct ways.
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 is no way to do that unless we absorb with deeper insight and empathy what they need. To me this was not something abstract, but rather something we all get to practice each day. When we talk to customers, we need to listen. It’s not an idle exercise. It is about being able to predict things that customers will love. That’s growth mindset. We learn about our customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring them solutions that meet their needs. 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.
Second, we are at our best when we actively seek diversity and inclusion. If we are going to serve the planet as our mission states, we need to reflect the planet. The diversity of our workforce must continue to improve, and we need to include a wide range of opinions and perspectives in our thinking and decision making. In every meeting, don’t just listen—make it possible for others to speak so that everyone’s ideas come through. Inclusiveness will help us become open to learning about our own biases and changing our behaviors so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. We need not just value differences but also actively seek them out, invite them in. And as a result, our ideas will be better, our products will be better, and our customers will be better served.
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. For some companies this comes more naturally. For example, those tech companies born with an open-source mentality get it. One group may create code and intellectual property but it’s open and available for inspection and improvement from other groups inside and outside the company. I tell my colleagues they get to own a customer scenario, not the code. Our code may need to be tailored one way for a small business and another way for a public-sector customer. It’s our ability to work together that makes our dreams believable and, ultimately, achievable. We must learn to build on the ideas of others and collaborate across boundaries to bring the best of Microsoft to our customers as one—one Microsoft.
When we exercise a growth mindset by being customer-obsessed, diverse, and inclusive and act as One Microsoft, that’s when we live our mission and truly make a difference in the world. Taken together, these concepts embody the growth in culture I set out to inculcate at Microsoft. I talked about these ideas every chance I got. 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.
To encourage the shift toward a learning culture, we created an annual hackathon during our OneWeek celebration, a time for everyone to be on campus simultaneously to make connections, learn about what others are doing, find inspiration, and collaborate. Playing off the notion of growth mindset, the hack made perfect sense. Within the subculture of computer programmers, hacking is a time-honored tradition of working around limitations and creatively solving a difficult problem or opportunity. In that first year, more than twelve thousand employees from eighty-three countries entered more than three thousand hacks ranging from ending sexism in video games to making computing more accessible to people with disabilities to improving industrial supply-chain operations.
One team was made up of people from multiple Microsoft groups across the company. They were interested in delivering better learning outcomes for kids with dyslexia. The Microsoft hackathon became an avenue for people with depth and passion, people spanning product groups like OneNote and Windows as well as research to come together and start a movement. They began by researching the science surrounding dyslexia and decided to go after a problem called visual crowding. Led by one of our software engineers, the team found ways to allow more space in between letters to make words more readable. But they didn’t stop there. They also found ways to create a more immersive reading function with the ability to highlight text and have it read out loud, further increasing reading comprehension. They built a tool to break words into syllables and to highlight the verb and subordinate clause. They got feedback from students and teachers. In fact, one teacher wrote to tell us about the gains she had seen in her classroom, including from a boy with dyslexia who could only read six words per minute. Even when he did make a fluency gain, he couldn’t sustain it. When he started using the tools our team built, she saw an immediate change. He was more willing to attempt assignments and his reading fluency skyrocketed. He went from reading only six words per minute to twenty-seven words per minute in a matter of weeks. Another student improved so much he was moved to a higher-level reading class. Today, the functionality that began as a Hackathon project is now built into some of our most important products, including Word, Outlook, and the Edge browser.
Now the annual growth hack has become a Microsoft tradition. Every year, employees—engineers, marketers, all professions—prepare in their home countries for the OneWeek growth hack like students preparing for a science fair, working in teams to hack problems they feel passionate about and then developing presentations designed to win votes from their colleagues. Gathered in tents named Hacknado and Codapalooza, they consume thousands of pounds of doughnuts, chicken, baby carrots, energy bars, coffe
e, and the occasional beer to fuel their creativity. Programmers and analysts suddenly transform into carnival barkers, selling their ideas to anyone who will listen. Reactions range from polite questions to vigorous debate and challenges. In the end, votes sent from smartphones are tallied, projects evaluated, winners celebrated. A few projects even receive funding as new business efforts.
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. Frankly, I am wired that way. 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?
As CEO, I’m not exempt from having to ask myself these questions. Each of my business decisions can be scrutinized in terms of whether or not it has helped Microsoft shift toward the growth mindset we aspire to.
Fixed-mindset decisions are ones that reinforce the tendency to continue doing what we’ve always done. Traditionally, when we launched a new version of Windows, existing Windows users would pay us to upgrade. Terry Myerson, the executive in charge of our Windows and devices group, had the growth mindset to shift, for a time, to a free consumer upgrade and forgo that revenue. In just a little over a year it had become the most popular Windows upgrade ever with hundreds of millions of users and still rising. We wanted customers to make that shift to loving Windows and to have the most personal and secure devices.
Upon reflection, we learned a lot from Nokia, even though it resulted in a painful write-down of the assets. Acquiring the Finnish smartphone company led to numeric growth in terms of people and revenue, but ultimately we failed to break through in the highly competitive mobile phone business. Importantly, though, we learned a lot about what it means to design, build, and manufacture hardware.
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