I marvel every day at how people can excel – and that’s what really gets me going.
This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places – as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world.
This is a software-powered world.
You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.
This notion of universal Windows apps is a very powerful concept because we’re now aggregating the 300-plus-million-socket run rate of Windows into one opportunity for our developers.
In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That’s both because of the physicality of computing–where the speed of light still matters–and because of geopolitics.
I discovered Buddha did not set out to found a world religion. He set out to understand why one suffers. I learned that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe.
If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups or downs of life. And only then would you be ready to develop that deeper sense of empathy and compassion for everything around you.
We needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs. It was time to hit refresh.
Every person, organization, and even society reaches a point at which they owe it to themselves to hit refresh – to reenergize, renew, reframe, and rethink their purpose.
If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups and downs of life.
Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place.
I knew that to lead effectively I needed to get some things square in my own mind – and, ultimately, in the minds of everyone who works at Microsoft. Why does Microsoft exist? And why do I exist in this new role? These are questions everyone in every organization should ask themselves. I worried that failing to ask these questions, and truly answer them, risked perpetuating earlier mistakes and, worse, not being honest.
The next time you are in a meeting, ask the quietest person what they think. Invite everyone into the conversation. If you are on a conference call, ask the people on the phone to share their thoughts first.
I told them that we spend far too much time at work for it not to have deep meaning.
Sure, in this age of continuous updates and always-on technologies, hitting refresh may sound quaint, but still when it’s done right, when people and cultures re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result.
We want not just intelligent machines but intelligible machines; not just artificial intelligence but symbiotic intelligence.
So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you.