Hit Refresh summary

After completing his studies at Manipal, Nadella found himself at a crossroads. His two options were to either stay in his comfort zone of his native India or follow his father’s advice and move on in search of greener pastures.

Initially, the choice seemed easy. As a young man, Nadella was deeply influenced by his mother’s spiritual philosophy, which held that it was always best to do your own thing in your own time. So without any pressure to shoot for the stars, he was inclined to accept the offer he had received from a good Bombay university for a place in its master’s program.

Nadella first set foot on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, in the fall of 1992. There was a buzz around the place. Work on Windows 95, the largest consumer technology product ever to be developed, was well underway. Bill Gates was still unknown to the wider public, but it was clear that something huge was about to happen. Nadella arrived just in time to see the project bear its first fruits.

Nadella was recruited to work on the Windows NT operating system. His job was to travel the country convincing customers – usually companies – to switch to Windows NT. While he was excited at the prospect of helping get the new system off the ground, Nadella also had other plans. He wanted to go to business school.

In January 2011, Steve Ballmer asked Nadella to take the lead on Microsoft’s new cloud technology project, “Server and Tools Business” or STB. Cloud technology was already a multi-billion dollar business by this point, but the largest slice of the pie had been gobbled up by Amazon. Nadella’s task? Reversing this and getting Microsoft into pole position. It was an incredibly ambitious project that would require excellent management skills.

But before we get to that, let’s take a closer look at cloud technology. Essentially, it’s a distributed computing system – it relies on a network of servers. That’s important because relying on a single server ends up crashing the whole system.  

Nadella might have given up on his boyhood dreams of becoming a professional cricketer, but the game continued to inspire him during his career at Microsoft. In fact, it was cricket that taught him the three principles by which he continues to live.

Rule number one is to compete when intimidated. As a teenager playing on his school cricket team, Nadella came up against an unfamiliar team, featuring several burly Australians. As they warmed up, Nadella and his teammates watched their opponents with awe. They wondered how on earth they were going to beat them.

Nadella’s son Zain was born in August 1996. His arrival changed the lives of his parents forever. Like cricket, fatherhood has taught Nadella an invaluable lesson – some of life’s problems just don’t have an easy fix.

Zain suffered from “asphyxia in utero,” an absence of oxygen in the womb that left him with lifelong disabilities. After his birth, Nadella and his wife Anu experienced months of anxious visits to intensive care units, touch-and-go surgeries and endless sleepless nights.

On February 4, 2014, Nadella followed in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to become Microsoft’s third CEO. It was a considerable achievement, but there was a problem – the company that he was now in charge of was struggling.

Why? The consensus at the time was that Microsoft just wasn’t as innovative as it had been in the past. People were swapping their PCs for smartphones, and Android and Apple operating systems were gradually pushing Microsoft out of the market. The view within the company wasn’t any better. In fact, in the annual employees’ poll, a majority stated that they believed Microsoft was heading in the wrong direction and questioned the company’s ability to innovate.

One of Microsoft’s greatest challenges is to deal with competitors like Apple, Google and Amazon. The traditional approach would be to show no mercy in an all-out business war. But that’s not the path Nadella chose. Instead, he chose to reach out to his company’s rivals and work together. That, he believes, doesn’t just benefit Microsoft – it also benefits the world.

Nadella first offered the metaphorical peace pipe to Apple shortly after taking up his position as CEO in 2014. At an annual Salesforce marketing event, Nadella pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and began talking about its unique features. The audience was stunned. No wonder –  it was the first time a Microsoft CEO had ever shown off an Apple product in this way!

People around the world are anxious about the direction the global economy seems to be moving in. Their biggest worry is the effect of new technologies on the labor market. As outsourcing and automation become ever more common, workers are increasingly concerned about the prospect of a jobless future.

The real problem, according to some experts, isn’t automation itself but the fact that there are more jobs automated out of existence than jobs being created. That’s the view of MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, a special advisor to Microsoft on economic affairs, who argues for a more balanced approach. Eliminating menial, poorly paid jobs can be a boon, but only if more rewarding, better-paid positions replace them. If those two processes aren’t in sync, however, the result is lower employment.