“Consistency is better than perfection.”
“Empathy is what I practice daily; understanding the other
person’s pain areas, difficulties solves many of my own problems in
understanding his or her behavior/intent.”
“When somebody finds fault in what I do, I consider it a
gift of insight that I wouldn’t otherwise have. Frankly, I am wired that way.”
“Team work; working with each other is the greatest skill you
can teach your family and friends. Because together, we achieve more.”
“I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in
the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to develop
deep shared understanding within teams and define a course of action.”
“To be a leader and partner at MS, you have to stop whining.
You can’t say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren’t enough good
people, or I didn’t get the bonus. Your job as a leader is to find rose petals
in a field of shit!”
“Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a
message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise.”
Satya Nadella’s book is a minefield of wisdom quotes that
only a seasoned, experienced business leader can share with his readers. He
defines two mindsets which can be used to categorize performance at the workplace:
Fixed Mindset: Decisions that reinforce the tendency to
continue doing what we’ve always done.
Growth Mindset: Decisions that force us to think out of the
box, to be creative in problem-solving and find solutions to problems without
cribbing about it. It encompasses individual empowerment and team work – what one
person or one team can do against the odds.
Two examples of a Fixed Mindset were shared:
1 An employee asking him in a Q&A session, “Why
can’t I print a document from my mobile phone?” Satya politely told him, ‘Make
it happen. You have full authority.”
2 On Yammer, employees were complaining that people
were leaving half-used milk cartons in the office refrigerator. Apparently,
people would open a fresh eight-ounce container of milk, pour some in their
coffee or tea, and then leave it out on the counter thinking others would
finish it. But no one wants to use a personal milk container opened by somebody
else that is beginning to sour.
Satya used one of his video
messages to employees to have a good laugh at it, showcasing it as a humorous
example of a fixed mindset.
He has spoken at length about the future
of technology that will facilitate Artificial Intelligence, Cloud computing and
Quantum computing.
He has taken references from
Hollywood movies that depict technology in a light-hearted manner. In the
movie, Creed, (the latest of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movie series) the
boxing champ jots down on a piece of paper a workout regimen for his protégé,
who quickly snaps a photo of it on his smartphone. As the kid jogs away, Rocky
yells, “Don’t you want the paper?”
“I got it right here, it’s already
up in the cloud,” the kid replies.
The aging Rocky looks skyward. “What
cloud? What cloud?” Rocky may not know about the cloud but millions today rely
on it.
