Hit Refresh Book Summary - Hit Refresh Book explained in key points

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Hit Refresh summary

Name: Hit Refresh
Rating: 4.4 (108 reviews)
Author: Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella

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

4.4 (108 ratings)

23 mins

Brief summary

"Hit Refresh" by Satya Nadella details his journey as the CEO of Microsoft, emphasizing the importance of empathy, leadership, and innovation. It encourages rethinking of business models to keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape.

Topics

Memoirs Leadership Success Big Tech Autobiographies

Table of Contents

Hit Refresh
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover the inspiring, true-life tale of the Indian boy who became the CEO of Microsoft.

Some words lose their meaning through overuse. “Globalization” is definitely an example of this. We generally associate this concept with abstract, large-scale processes and movements. What’s often missing, however, are the personal stories of the people who define our increasingly interconnected world.

Few biographies capture the realities of a globe-spanning life better than that of Satya Nadella. From a youth spent dreaming of cricketing stardom in the 1980s in India to his meteoric rise through the ranks of Microsoft in the US, Nadella’s story is a fascinating thumbnail sketch of the world we live in today.

But it’s also a deeply intimate portrait of a fascinating individual. As Nadella himself likes to point out, his business acumen and leadership skills are rooted in everyday life. Whether it’s on the cricket field or as a father raising a disabled son, his way of seeing things has always reflected his personal experiences.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

what businesspeople can learn from cricketers;
why empathy is so important to leadership; and
why automation doesn’t necessarily mean a jobless future.

Nadella grew up in India, and there was little he cared more about than cricket.

Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India, in 1967. His father was a civil servant, and his mother was a scholar of Sanskrit, the ancient language of many of the country’s religious texts. As a young boy, however, Nadella wasn’t interested in politics or religion. What he really cared about was cricket.

But his parents had other ideas for him. In fact, his father even hung a poster of Karl Marx in his son’s room in the hope of inspiring him to become a great economist and intellectual. His mother responded with a poster of the Indian goddess of fortune and prosperity, which she hoped would remind him of the value of spiritual contentment. Nadella wasn’t having any of it. His favorite poster? A blown-up image of the Hyderabadi cricket star ML Jaisimha!

Nadella’s love affair with the sport gradually became a source of real concern. What, his parents wondered, would he do if his dream of becoming a professional cricketer didn’t come to anything? The answer Nadella came up with was banking. His father wasn’t happy with that either, however, and told him one day, “You’ve got to get out of Hyderabad. Otherwise, you’ll ruin yourself.”

That got Nadella thinking. At 18, he dusted off his old Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer – a gift his father had given him three years earlier. As he played around with the gadget, his thoughts increasingly turned to engineering, software and the great potential of personal computing. He enrolled at the Manipal Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering and graduated in 1988.

It was during his studies that Nadella’s dream of playing cricket professionally finally came to an end. At Manipal, he fell in with a group of entrepreneurial peers whose passion was positively infectious. After a single match for the Manipal college team, Nadella hung his cricketing gear up for good and decided to devote himself to a career in technology.

Swapping the warm hills of Hyderabad for the chilly plains of Wisconsin changed Nadella’s perspective on the world.

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.

Starting at Microsoft, Nadella set himself up for leadership.

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.

To successfully develop Microsoft’s cloud technologies, Nadella established an environment of trust in his team.

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.

Cricket taught Nadella the art of leadership.

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.

The birth of Nadella’s son made him a more empathetic leader.

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.

When he became Microsoft’s third CEO, Nadella set out to rediscover Microsoft’s soul.

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.

Nadella believes there’s great value in keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

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!

A balanced approach to automation offers companies the best chance of thriving in the new economy.

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.

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What is Hit Refresh about?

Hit Refresh (2017) charts the journey of Satya Nadella, from his childhood as a cricket-obsessed boy in Hyderabad, India, to working at the very top of global tech powerhouse Microsoft. Packed full of illuminating reflections on everything from the psychology of the cricket field to what parenthood can teach us about business, these blinks provide a rare insight into the life and thoughts of one of the world’s most influential men.

Who should read Hit Refresh?

Tech-heads and computer whizzes
Business students and entrepreneurs
Anyone interested in the past, present or future of Microsoft

About the Author

Satya Nadella is an Indian-American business executive and the current CEO of Microsoft. Before taking up his current position, Nadella was in charge of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group. He holds three degrees from institutions in India and the US, including an MBA from the University of Chicago. He’s also a father, a husband and a keen cricketer.

Categories with Hit Refresh

Biography & Memoir Management & Leadership Technology & the Future

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