Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., speaks during 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 the type of executive to boast and demean rivals. It has been more measured since taking the place of the outspoken Steve Ballmer seven years ago, forming alliances with competitors like Red Hat and Salesforce and even enabling people to use Amazon’s Alexa assistant on Windows operating systems.
On Thursday, he put his most peaceful approach into 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 sucks,’ that’s not leadership,” said Nadella during an appearance at the Economic Summit organized by the Stanford University Economic Policy Research Institute. “In a world with multiple stakeholders and constituents, you need to bring people together in your company and beyond.”
In addition to standing out from Ballmer, who criticized the efforts of rivals like Apple and Google, Nadella also differs from his 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 also different from Gates. In a 2013 question-me-anything session on Reddit, he wrote that “seriously, Bing is the best product right now,” even though Google has control of market share in Internet searches.
In contrast, Nadella’s Microsoft has become more tolerant of other business forces. While open source software was seen as competition in the past, Microsoft purchased the open source storage service GitHub for $ 7.5 billion in 2018, and the company incorporated the open source Linux operating system into Windows.
When Nadella makes distinctions from rivals, he is less pronounced about it. He said at a Microsoft Ignite conference on Tuesday, for example, that “no customer wants to depend on a provider that sells technology on one side and competes with him on the other” – probably a reference to Amazon, which competed with some of your customers in the cloud.
Here are some of the other points about leadership that Nadella mentioned at the virtual event:
- “Leaders have this innate ability to get into situations that are uncertain, ambiguous and bring clarity … leaders are not people who get into a confused situation and create more confusion. They actually create clarity, and that is something that leaders absolutely have to take responsibility. “
- “Leaders create energy. You know when you meet someone who is 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 pitch to perform well.’ I can’t say, ‘Let me wait until the pandemic is over to show my leadership skills’. In many cases, you have to take on an excessively restricted problem and decompress yourself and, more particularly, decompress the team you are leading, so that they can proceed to get things done. “
Nadella said that no one will be perfect. But he wonders if he is better than yesterday.
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