Hit Refresh

Microsoft had quite an impressive journey within the last decade. Satya Nadella's wisdom and leadership style played significant role on Microsoft's turn around.

This book have a lot to offer when it comes to leadership. Satya not only shared his insight but also shared a lot from others within the Microsoft as well as the industry in large.

Futuristic thoughts around topics such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and mixed reality are quite interesting. I really liked Satya's optimistic/realistic interpretation of these controversial topics.

I'm fascinated by Satya Nadella and his transformation of Microsoft. While there were moments where his personality came through, this is mostly a bland piece of corporate hagiography, and you should look elsewhere for insights into that work.

The first part of the book is the most valuable. It's a first person account of Nadella's upbringing, education, and entry into the tech field. It captured how much pride he has in being both his father's son and his mother's son, as well as his clear love for his wife and family and his love for the cosmopolitan and ambitious India he grew up in.

The next part is about his rise to CEO, and the undoing work he accomplished to change the corporate culture at Microsoft. There are a lot of corporate credits (our great work growing our cloud business was accomplished by such visionary leaders as blah blah blah) and a lot of telling but not showing (over the course of several meetings, we reached a consensus about how to move forward...).

As with all transformational stories, details matter. If you zoom out far enough, all transformational narratives are the same: I was doing it one way, I wanted to change, I finally let go of what was holding me back from change, I tried a different way, and that turned out way better.

There's not much more than that here. There are references to Microsoft losing its way and employee unhappiness, but a reluctance to call out specific mistakes. There is almost no specificity about the personnel changes that he made to signal that more changes were coming down the line. There is a little more detail about Nadella's “new way,” including: moving away from the mindset of corporate friends and enemies and toward thinking about all other corporations as potential partnerships, breaking down the inefficient communication and empty status symbols of 20th century blue-chip corporate hierarchy, and stoking a real hunger for learning about use cases and developing sales channel for every sector of the market.

If there's any value in this book, it's in this section.

The final section is Nadella's prognostication of the future. It seems completely ghostwritten and is structured around Nadella visiting various Microsoft R&D initiatives and marveling with wet eyes about what he finds. Skip it. Skip the whole book*.

*I am aware that most people probably never even considered reading the book, that a book by a major corporate CEO was guaranteed to be bland and impersonal. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

Don't forget Microsoft
https://luttig.substack.com/p/dont-forget-microsoft

Expected a lot from this book.

Piękna, wyidealizowana historia, ale mało konkretna, mało „pikantna”, napisana bardziej jak usprawiedliwienie niż wielka wizja. Do szybkiego przesłuchania jako audiobook z prędkością 1.75x.

Very underwhelming. A very generic biography for someone at the helm of a company such as Microsoft.
The only key takeaway is his belief in the need for more empathy in technology.

I struggled to finish this book. Thought it would be inspiring and maybe give a glimpse of the new approach Microsoft is taking. Not the case for me...