Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., speaks at a Bloomberg event on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, January 21, 2020.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not a type of executive to brag and take down rivals. He’s been more measured since he took over from Steve Ballmer, more open seven years ago, forming alliances with challengers like Red Hat and Salesforce and even making it possible for people to use Amazon’s Amazon assistant in Windows operating systems.
On Thursday, he expressed his more peaceful approach in words when former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes asked him what leadership advice he gives within the company.
“Just saying, ‘Well, my team is great and everyone else is miserable,’ that’s not leadership,” Nadella said during an appearance at the Economic Summit hosted by Stanford University’s Economic Policy Research Institute. “In a multi-stakeholder, multi-constituent world, you need to bring together people from across the company and from outside.”
In addition to being noted by Ballmer, who criticized the efforts of rivals such as Apple and Google, Nadella also differs from her colleagues at other major technology companies, including Larry Ellison of Oracle and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, while co-founder Bill Gates was still in charge. But Nadella is different from Gates. In a question-and-answer session in 2013 on Reddit, he wrote that “seriously Bing is the best product right now,” despite the fact that Google had a controlling market share when searching the Internet.
Instead, Nadella’s Microsoft has become more tolerant of other business forces. While open-source software has been seen as a competition in the past, Microsoft bought GitHub’s open-source code storage service for $ 7.5 billion in 2018, and the company incorporated the open-source operating system. Linux in Windows.
When Nadella draws distinctions from rivals, she is less pronounced about it. He said Tuesday at an Ignite conference Tuesday at Microsoft that “no customer wants to be dependent on a vendor who sells their technology at one end and competes with them on the other” – probably a reference to Amazon, which competed with some of its customers in the cloud.
Here are some of the other leadership points Nadella mentioned at the virtual event:
- “Leaders have this innate ability to get into uncertain, ambiguous situations that bring clarity … leaders are not people who get into a confusing situation and create more confusion. they must be held accountable. “
- “Leaders create energy. You know when you meet someone who’s a leader because you go out and say, ‘Wow, I want to join the parade.’ I want to be part of that team. “
- “Leaders don’t say, ‘Give me the perfect tone to perform.’ I can’t say, “Let me wait for the pandemic to show up to show me my leadership skills.” You have to take an over-constrained problem in many cases and constrain yourself and constrain yourself especially the team you lead so that they can continue to accomplish things. “
Nadella said no one will be perfect. But he wonders if he’s better than he was yesterday.
CLOCK: Citi calls Microsoft the best software choice