Things[5] I Learned About Leadership from the Death and Rebirth of Microsoft
Dare Obasanjo reflects on Satya Nadella's leadership at Microsoft, highlighting lessons on cultural change, customer focus, cutting losses, efficient resource allocation, and embracing open source, leading to stock price success.
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In a Medium article, Dare Obasanjo reflects on Microsoft's transformation under Satya Nadella's leadership. He highlights five key lessons learned from the company's turnaround. Firstly, Nadella focused on changing Microsoft's culture, promoting a growth mindset and encouraging innovation. Secondly, he shifted the company's focus to prioritize customer needs over rigid strategies, exemplified by launching Office on the iPad. Thirdly, Nadella demonstrated the importance of cutting losses by discontinuing unsuccessful ventures like Windows Phone and Nokia Lumia. Fourthly, the CFO, Amy Hood, emphasized considering the opportunity cost of investments, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Lastly, under Nadella, Microsoft embraced open source and listened to engineers, enhancing productivity and morale within the company. These strategic shifts led to Microsoft's stock price soaring to $410 and being hailed as a successful tech industry CEO. Nadella's leadership exemplifies the importance of cultural transformation, customer-centricity, strategic decision-making, resource allocation, and valuing the input of engineers in driving organizational success.
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7 commentsMicrosoft had a lot of big successes in the "dead" period - Xbox for example is pretty absent, as is Surface. They also had a lot of non-successes that were revolutionary in their own right - basically inventing the first major music streaming service.
Also, most of the key changes at Microsoft were underway before Nadella - most importantly getting business customers to agree to subscription service models and cloud migration.
It's interesting the article completely leaves out how Microsoft abandoning stack ranking when Satya was brought on as the new CEO. Ballmer continued to defend it even after he left the company. I think getting rid of this had a huge impact on the "growth mindset" that allowed them to get out from under a lot of the underperforming products and teams within the company. Instead of competing with each other, they were all on the same team now, trying to collectively push the company in a better direction.
It worked at MS because Satya could do the hard things - killing the Windows Phone, embracing Open source thus signaling to the employees that there would be a radical shift.
Too many companies talk about culture, especially leadership, and not realize that it starts top-down.
MS was a remarkable turnaround story.
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