Microsoft’s New CEO Needs An Editor | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s New CEO Needs An Editor

mondaynote.com

I really enjoyed "Microsoft is the Very Antithesis of Strategy" that was linked to by this Monday Note:

http://techpinions.com/microsoft-is-the-very-antithesis-of-s...

Really, I can see some bad assessments in it. #3 and #4 are easily refuted via IE and Xbox. The Bing example in #1 is pretty bad as without Bing they wouldn't have had a partner like Facebook and they would have struggled to find services for Windows phone and tablets.

Also for a article picking on statements from others, statements like "Surface is an attempt to pretend Apple didn’t solve the tablet problem when they introduced the iPad. " seems plain stupid since Android has taken the lead from Apple and I don't think anybody believes the tablet "problem" is solved yet

This is beautiful: "If I’m presented with statements I cannot realistically disagree with – We Will Behave With Utmost Integrity – I feel there’s something wrong. If it’s all pro and no con, it’s a con."

That's advice for life.

It reminded me of Mark Zuckerberg's quote that "values are only useful if they're controversial".

Eh, they're useful if you're changing a culture or if your organisation exists within a larger framework.

For example, the 2gether NHS Foundation Trust (a Mental Heath trust for Gloucestershire and Hereford) has trust values. The first is "Seeing things from the service user's perspective". This sounds uncontroversial and obvious hut many people (clinicians (in and out of MH); social workers; police; teachers; etc) who come into contact with people with MH problems are ignorant to the point of bigotry and so it's a useful value to have, to remind staff that often people who are saying odd things are not doing so as a function of illness, but because it is their actual lived experience.

One quick examples:

When I say I don't think Heath House Hospital in Bristol ("Bristol Priory") is safe partly because of the Robert Mugabe torturer it sounds like a feature of illness. But actually, Heath House hospital did employ someone who had illegally entered the UK and was using forged documents, and that person used to work for Mugabe as a torturer.

Personally I would have trouble respecting and following the lead of a person who spoke with this level of apparently deliberate obfuscation and non-inform speak.

To me, it, appears to be an attempt to deceive rather than enlighten, and it certainly wouldn't give me a good attitude nor make me feel better about the company.

But I don't work for those kind of companies, and maybe the people who do have a high tolerance for this kind of behavior by now. I guess it beats a guy walking around the halls swinging a baseball bat and dashing about the stage like a wild man during company pep rallies.

Essentially, this article is complaining that Nadella is playing politics. When you're dependent on mass complicity, boasting airy platitudes and leaving the plan publicly undefined (that is, saying a bunch of stuff that's impossible to disagree with) is the only way to succeed. You don't become CEO of Microsoft by being a political ignoramus. Nadella knew this would go public and is using it to project the image the company wishes to attain for itself. It doesn't matter if it's real or not, the mere act of repetition does much to reinforce the belief in the audience's mind.

I've learned that the most successful C-levels will almost never commit anything substantive to writing. Send them an email looking for direction and it's always, "Let's talk about that tomorrow". There are a lot of strong political reasons for that.

Absolutely true. Nadella knows exactly what he's trying to say, but he has to fluff it up to avoid ambush.

But at his level, you're gonna get ambushed by someone no matter what you write.

Perhaps this was why Steve was so exciting. :) Of course, it caught up to the company in courts, but ...

Whoever wrote this article is a bit delusional. Every CEO letter in Silicon Valley is full of ridiculous cliches and platitudes. Why did the author pick this particular CEO for censure? I can think of only two reasons: 1) Nadella is foreign looking 2) Microsoft is everyone's favorite punching bag.

Have you read some of the communication coming out of Facebook and Salesforce? Jesus, just walk around Facebook's campus and you'll see ridiculous motivational posters that say things like, "DEMAND EXCELLENCE!"

Why did the author pick this particular CEO for censure?

Because the "whoever" who wrote the article is Jean-Louis Gassée, who as an executive of Apple and Be, Inc had half a lifetime of an adversarial relationship with Microsoft.

This article needs an editor.

Can you provide a concrete example of a possible edit? (I'm applying the logic of the article).

Mantel instead of mantle is one that jumped out at me. EDIT:

> “Nadella is a repeat befuddler. His first email to employees, sent just after he assumed the CEO mantel on earlier this year, was filled with bombastic and false platitudes:”

mantel: a beam, stone, or arch serving as a lintel to support the masonry above a fireplace

mantle: a figurative cloak symbolizing preeminence or authority <accepted the mantle of leadership>

It took me some time to realise that the triangle thing wasn't a quote from the microsoft email.

Who doesn't?

* * *

You can only boldly tell what you're going to do if you know what you're going to do.

When in Enterprise, write as the middle managers do.

Great article. Not just for its crisp analysis of what Nadella did wrong, but even more so for how he could have expressed his thoughts clearly and gotten it right.

I find the pyramid diagram with the arrow elegant and compelling. Is this a widely known schema, or something the author devised?

Sounds like the new CEO is very good at "fluffing" up his word count. He says a lot, but says very little.

This was my exact impression whenever I heard him speak at internal Microsoft meetings. He always says so much without ever actually saying anything. We would leave the meetings realizing that nothing he said had any impact on us. He's obviously an incredibly smart person, but always seemed afraid to take even a somewhat controversial opinion on anything.

That's because Microsoft has now become IBM and what they say or plan to do is now irrelevant. He is the perfect CEO for this stage in Microsoft's journey.

Sounds like the author wants to apply for the position

then said author would need to brush up on their own writing skills.

I hope people know I was joking

Maybe he just enjoys trolling with vapid, rambling emails?

Microsoft as an entity needs [i]self-awareness[/i]. Here, in one example, it lacks the self-awareness to realize that it needs an editor.

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