How Satya Nadella plans to change our future
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella invited me for an informal chat with him at Davos this year. I was expecting a nerdy CEO with a supercilious air. After all, he was the boss of America's fourth largest company, its third most valuable, a pioneer of the computer revolution which changed the world.
He was none of that. I found a person who was gentle, self-effacing but doggedly committed to his mission. There was a monk-like quality about him, a clarity of thought and zeal.
Here is a man who is not only out to transform his company but also the world. He feels he's in the business of empowerment. He wants to create technology so that others can create more technology.
For him, work cannot be transactional, it must have meaning. It is not just about creating shareholder value but about making a difference to the world around us. Only then can one justify spending more time at work than with one's loved ones.
In all this, the Hyderabad-born CEO who left India at 21 to study at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is unique in that he's not as obsessed by quarterly earnings as he is about transformation. Quite unusually, he's chosen to write a book mid-career: titled Hit Refresh, it reflects on what he's going through rather than the standard "look backs" on retirement. He's finding it quite cathartic.
As we head out into an increasingly uncertain future where technology is moving towards greater artificial intelligence and society is gravitating towards more leisure, reading his book (we carry exclusive excerpts in this issue) is like diving into a deep blue ocean of ideas and opportunities.
A team of editors, led by group editorial director Raj Chengappa, went to Redmond, Washington, to meet Nadella and understand the company to which he has dedicated a quarter century. They found an exciting new world where the future is being reinvented through the world of mixed reality.
He introduced our team to advances in artificial intelligence. The last frontier which he got everyone excited about was quantum computing. Nadella talked about India, where he believes the smartphone revolution has to go beyond the obsession with ABCD - Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket and Darshan-which can happen only when technology is used in a broad-spectrum way within the local economy.
Since taking over from Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO in 2014, Nadella has grown the company by sticking to its core principles. He has saved the company from fading into irrelevance in the era of smartphones by focusing on cloud computing and augmented reality. He has expanded shrewdly, paying $26.2 billion for the professional network, LinkedIn. He has succeeded by embracing the skills that the new world requires-focusing on an innovation mindset, where leaders make it their mission to learn new things, even though they know they won't succeed in all of them.
Microsoft's mission statement was once, in Bill Gates's words, "A personal computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software." Nadella has altered it to: "Empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more."
Our editors say Indian philosophy seems to have deeply influenced him, especially when he talks about rediscovering the soul of Microsoft. While Chengappa hasn't quite become a Microsoftie, he does believe that with Nadella at the helm, the world is better viewed through a window rather than a mirror. I couldn't agree more.
(India Today Editor-in-Chief's note for cover story, Satya Nadella: Beyond the Cloud; October 2, 2017.)