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 the kind of executive to brag and destroy rivals. He’s been more measured since he took over from Steve Ballmer, more frankly, seven years ago, forming alliances with challengers like Red Hat and Salesforce and even making people able to use Amazon’s Alexa assistant on Windows operating systems.
On Thursday, he expressed in words his most peaceful approach when former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes asked him what leadership advice he gives the company.
“Just saying,‘ Well, my team is fantastic and everyone sucks, ’that’s not leadership,” Nadella said during an appearance at the Economic Summit organized by the University of California’s Economic Policy Research Institute. Stanford. “In a multi-stakeholder, multi-constituent world, you need to bring people from all over your business in and out”
In addition to standing out from Ballmer, who criticized the efforts of rivals such as Apple and Google, Nadella also differs from her peers in other major technology companies, such as Larry Ellison of Oracle and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 while co-founder Bill Gates was still at the helm. But Nadella is also different from Gates. In a 2013 session, ask me anything on Reddit, he wrote that “seriously Bing is the best product right now,” even though Google had a controlling market share in Internet search.
In contrast, Nadella’s Microsoft has become more tolerant of other business forces. Although open source software was considered competition in the past, Microsoft bought GitHub open source storage service for $ 7.5 billion in 2018 and the company incorporated the Linux open source operating system into Windows .
When Nadella makes distinctions from rivals, she is less pronounced about it. He said at a Microsoft Ignite conference on Tuesday, for example, that “no customer wants to depend on a vendor that sells them technology at one end and competes with them on the other,” probably a reference to Amazon, which has competed with some of your customers in the cloud.
Here are some of the other points about leadership that Nadella mentioned in the virtual event:
- “Leaders have this innate ability to get into uncertain, ambiguous situations that bring clarity … leaders are not people who go into a confusing situation and create more confusion. They really create clarity, and that’s something that leaders they are absolutely absolute. they must be held accountable as responsible. “
- “Leaders create energy. You know when you’ve met someone who’s a leader because you come out saying, ‘Wow, I want to join the parade.’ I want to be part of this team. “
- “Leaders don’t say,‘ Give me the perfect tone to act. ’I can’t say,‘ Let me wait for the pandemic to take place to show my leadership skills. ’In many cases, you have to face an overly limited problem and you don’t have to limit yourself, and you’re going to restrict more particularly the team you’re leading, so that they can get things done. ”
Nadella said no one will be perfect. But he does wonder if it’s better than yesterday.
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