Satya Nadella email to employees on first day as CEO
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
The first sentence of the email, statement that seems entirely appropriate given the circumstances.
Nonetheless, I find it curious that we expect people who reach the highest levels of accomplishment to describe those accomplishments as humbling. It seems natural to us for someone promoted to the heights of their profession, such as Satya Nadella in this case, or the winner of a Nobel prize or an academy award, for example, to describe the accomplishment as "humbling", when logically speaking it should be anything but.
Is such a statement part of a defense mechanism against egotism that prevents the honored individual from loosing the discipline that allowed them to excel in the first place? Is it an attempt to say, "this doesn't change me, I am still who I was before"? Is it just a manipulation, a defense against envy and derision, an attempt to reduce the motivation of others to "take them down a notch"? Or is it something else?
Without thinking about it too deeply, it seems right to read that Satya Nadella is humbled to become one of the most powerful corporate executives in the world, but why? And is it correct?
I don't understand this. It would be more humbling if, being at the top of your game and fully expecting to get the job, you were turned down for the CEO position. Or they demote you to a lower position. /That/ would be humbling. You're humlbed when you suddenly are forced to re-evaluate your self-worth after it's made clear it doesn't match the real-world scenario, not when you reach the top or reaffirm your position.
When I read that I knew this guy would fail as MS CEO. It's a proper jungle out there and a humble Indian guy will be eaten alive by the aggressive confident westerners.
He didn't become CEO because he played it nice. I'm sure he's been as aggressive and mean when he's needed to be to advance himself and his work.
It's humbling because out of the many many top candidates he got the job. It's humbling to be considered at that level among your peers and be picked.
I would venture to say that he mixes the best of east indian tradition and western tradition.
The board is filled with very capable people, especially John W. Thompson. He was the CEO of Symantec and took that company from its early beginnings to a major player.
Time will tell if this was a right pick for CEO but I believe that most will be very happy with the choice as its a good contrast to what Steve Ballmer was.
That said, I'm sure at least 50% of the usage choice in his email was rhetorical gesture. It's become commonplace for people receiving awards, honors, or offices to describe themselves as "humbled." Somewhere in the semi-distant past, someone determined that this was a good PR move.
He's in charge in the sense that he has the authority to tell you to do something that may damage your future.
Generally, society finds it better to choose to be humble. It can be quite a complex feeling in real world practice, though.
Don't read into it too much.
I wish his email had started like that instead.
Being unproven in a new type of challenge is humbling.
We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us forward. We must change this.
The problem, of course, is just that Win8 is in a screwed up transition both in the UI and under-the-hood.
Yes, Microsoft has ADD - constant re-brandings and the MSDN-churn of new platforms are frustrating. But they've built a good family of products in their counterattack against Google/Android.
WinPhone7 was a great product on paper - still is - that was released half-baked missing a great number of features that consumers expected to be standard. It was further undermined when Microsoft decided to cut the early adopters and run (WP7 phones that never got the WP7.5 update).
Hell, even the much-maligned Kin I think was a great idea. In an era with stupidly expensive data plans, the idea was to come up with a social-media-only (Twitter, Facebook, SMS) device coupled with a kid-compatible cheap monthly plan, based on the existing expertise of Danger. Then they decided to rewrite the whole tech stack, pushed the product way out of its launch window, and lost out on the core offering: cheap plans. What ended up launching was nowhere near what was envisioned.
I believe Windows 8 and the merging of touch and desktop was, and still is, a great idea. A platform that can seamlessly transform between mobile and desktop contexts can be incredibly powerful and reflects the combination of MS's traditional strengths in work-products and the newer consumer mobile space. Of course, the execution there was well off the mark - Metro was foisted upon the desktop context and was strictly inferior to what it tried to replace, and key productivity tools were removed in the name of unification.
MS gets the big picture, but they keep fucking up the details. Here's hoping Nadella can turn this around.
I'm sure everyone read it with a neutral response, because it was pretty boilerplate (as it kind of has to be).
I wonder what the sentiment is on the ground among softies.
Oh they are going to ditch Windows and Secure Boot and help develop Linux for mainstream users? This must be the news of the year!
Every day they continue requiring Secure Boot on Windows RT, this lie continues to get bigger.
I am 46. I’ve been married for 22 years and we have 3 kids."
-> Who cares?
I find those cultural differences fascinating
What I will say, though, is that statements like that from a CEO can often give comfort to employees raising families. It can be jarring, for example, to transition from a boss who allows flexible workdays to take your kids to school, drive them to practice, etc. to one who doesn't. For a CEO, there's even the possibility of changing policies on parental leave, etc. that can definitely affect morale.
There's also the aspect of Nadella offering himself as a role-model for those who are wondering if there's life after 30 in the tech world. It can be reassuring to know that you can get married, have children, get older, have a personal life, etc. and still become CEO of a company. IMO it's a good counter-argument to the no-holds-barred hustle culture that is peddled to 20-somethings.
That may be true now, but there have indeed been unmarried Presidents. Just saying.
These days, it's trendy do the "I am... x3" tagline on your blog. Many of us will write something along the line of, "I'm a father of 3. I'm a technologist. And I'm an avid surfer".