Talks at GS – Satya Nadella: Hitting Refresh on the Cul… — Transcript

Satya Nadella discusses Microsoft's transformation, culture, and the importance of a growth mindset in technology leadership.

Key Takeaways

Transformation requires both personal and organizational change.
Culture is a dynamic cycle linked to innovation and capability development.
A growth mindset is essential for continuous learning and adapting to change.
Diversity and inclusion are critical to fostering a sense of belonging and maximizing talent.
Leaders must actively practice and promote a learning culture to sustain success.

Summary

Satya Nadella shares insights on Microsoft's transformation to a cloud-centric company and its future vision.
The discussion emphasizes the importance of dealing with change personally and organizationally.
Nadella explains the relationship between concept, capability, and culture in a company's success.
He highlights the need for culture to be explicit beyond the founder's influence to foster new ideas and capabilities.
The growth mindset, inspired by Carol Dweck's research, is central to Microsoft's cultural shift.
Nadella stresses that growth mindset is about continuous learning and confronting fixed mindsets daily.
Diversity and inclusion are key to fostering a culture of belonging and unlocking human potential.
The conversation touches on challenges in tech culture, especially in Silicon Valley, and how to address them.
Nadella advocates practicing learning culture actively, akin to going to the gym every day.
Leadership involves creating an environment where people can do their best work through inclusion and belonging.

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Welcome everyone to Goldman Sachs. I'm thrilled to be joined by one of today's leading technologists, and he also happens coincidentally to be the CEO of Microsoft. It's our guest Satya Nadella. We're delighted that you're here, thank you. Thank you. Satya

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is a longtime resident of Redmond, Washington. He joined Microsoft in 1992, helped start Microsoft search engine Bing, and has been a vital part of the cloud business of Microsoft since its infancy, completely repositioning Microsoft to be cloud-centric. And now he's up to transforming Microsoft to be as

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successful in the next 40 years as it was in its first 40 years. I just finished about an hour ago reading Satya's book, Hit Refresh.

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And actually, it's a must-read. I strongly encourage you to do that. We'll be talking about some of the themes, and welcome, Satya. Thank you so much, Marty. Thank you for having me here. Absolutely. So let's start off. One of the topics of your book that immediately grabbed my attention,

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one of my favorite words seems to be one of yours, which is transformation. And it's not just a book about transforming oneself or one's company, but it's really much bigger and broader than that. And so why did you choose that

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topic and why now? Yeah, I mean, what came perhaps more naturally to me was to think about our company and the process of change or dealing with change. I mean, if you think about what's the one perennial topic for all of us, it's how do we deal with

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change? And change has got this following attribute. Everybody loves to talk about it except nobody likes changing because you would rather have the other person change and you remain. But at the same time, we know that unless and until we transform and

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deal with change, it's going to be hard. So I've thought a lot about Microsoft's transformation, but Microsoft's transformation cannot happen without the broader transformation in our economy and in our society. I guess there's a feedback loop after all between the broader change that is afoot and in fact what you have

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to do because in some sense you're trying to meet the market. The other side of it is who you are as a leader. And what you have to do in order to drive change means you yourself personally have to look back.

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And that's where the three stanzas, at least, of the book are really trying to trace out, which is what's the transformative journey that I've been through?

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Not as a destination that has been reached, but more as what are the lessons learned while you deal with change in life and at work and in our society. And so that is why I think it's probably the most important discussion for

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us to have. And so on that journey of transformation, you talked at some length about culture. And that also struck me. We certainly treasure our culture and we talk about it, and yet it isn't always clear exactly what culture is generally and how to define one's culture. So

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how do you think about those two topics? What it is and how you chose to define it for your company? In fact, one of the things that has helped me come to culture is to think about, in fact, what I

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describe as this beautiful virtuous cycle you create between your concept, your capability, and culture. I mean, think about it this way. The simplest way, you're a successful firm like Goldman. It obviously started because you had an amazing concept, an amazing novel new idea. That new novel idea needed new

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capability, which you inherently built because of all the human capital you have here, and that's what transformed this concept from just an idea into reality in the marketplace.

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And implicitly, the culture gets built around it, around the concept and capability. And then you get into this beautiful, virtuous lock between the three, and round and round it goes, except at some point, that concept, because of just the laws of nature, runs out of gas. You now

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need a new concept. That new concept will need new capability. In fact, you would have needed new capability long before it was conventional wisdom that it was required to drive the new concept. That's when I think culture matters.

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In fact, I always say this, which is you, if you're in that first phase of your growth, maybe even the first one and a half phases of your growth, culture is implicit, it's sort of wound up in essentially the founder's own cult of

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personality. It's only when you get past that, culture better be explicit so that you are constantly building new capability and giving room for new concepts. So that's one of the reasons why I kind of emphasize culture. I mean, for us, having

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been very successful for 40 years, we needed to go back and say, okay, what made us successful in the first place? And make it much more explicit so that we can retrace, but with new concepts and new capabilities. So that's sort of

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where I got to culture. But to your specific question, what happened was, I'd read this book maybe a couple of years before I became CEO, more in the context of my kids, called Mindset by Carol Dweck at Stanford. And when I

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read it, it was an amazing book, which has this one simple concept, which is you take two kids in school, one of them is a know-it-all and the other is a learn-it-all, and then you know what happens ultimately. Even if the know-it-all starts

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with a lot more innate capability, the learn-it-all ultimately will do better. Then it struck me that that applies to CEOs like me, but it applies to organizations like Microsoft. And I was seeking this meme that we could have which could be

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an explicit handle to have a conversation around culture. And we used to always talk about culture except there were these posters we would put up in our sort of conference rooms and forget about them. And so I was actually, when I

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said, okay, let's take this growth mindset meme and put it up and talk about it, I mean, Microsoft's also very engineering, analytical culture, and I thought, man, this will get rejected out of, nobody would want to pay attention to it. But

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for some reason, it's stuck. Because I think it speaks to more our innate need as humans, as opposed to some new dogma from a company.

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And so, so far, so good. I mean, that's something that has been very, very helpful for us. So if you think about culture in, say, the technology industry, or for that matter in Wall Street, perhaps in different time periods, there's been some

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challenges and certainly much in the media right now, specifically as it relates to Silicon Valley these days, right? It seems to be the West Coast turn. And so what do you think about some of those negative turns in the technology culture and

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what to do about it? Yeah, no, that's a great point, Marty, because in some sense, you take this concept of growth mindset, then okay, that's fine, it's a nice fancy word, so what do you do about it? It's like going

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to the gym, you gotta practice it every day. And so how do we make it practical? One of the things that we talk a lot about is diversity and inclusion. A great place to confront your fixed mindset. Because a lot

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of times people come to me and say, Satya, we found the five people at Microsoft who don't have a growth mindset. And I say, well, that's not the point.

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The point is not to go and... To report them. Yeah, it's not the point to go looking for the five people not having the growth mindset. It's more about me confronting my fixed mindset each day. And that's, in some sense, if you really

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want to walk the walk of a learning culture, it's being able to learn from your mistakes, which we all make every day. In that context of take diversity and inclusion, one of the things that's super important for us is to say, well, we

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want to get out of all this great human capital in the company. We want everyone to be able to do their best work. It's not going to happen if those people who are in the company don't feel a sense of belonging. Let's start

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with inclusion and then let's build towards belonging. Practice as a leader, as a manager, you

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Microsoft we would have had a culture of the loudest voice wins. That doesn't really foster an inclusive culture. So I think whether it is about gender diversity, ethnic diversity, or having people of different backgrounds and skills and styles thrive requires

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But the one thing that I've also learned is the tone at the top, speaking about whether at Microsoft, our industry or at large, you've got to set it at the top. People will key off what I do and what

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I say and how I show up, whether it's in an individual meeting, the diversity in my own leadership team, That's what is going to be the signal that's going to propagate. And so therefore, taking the words seriously and acting

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on it, being much more transparent. One of the things that I'm so glad we're doing it, I don't know if that's happening even in Wall Street, because we now report a lot of the data. around our demographics and the shifts in

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it. And we have goals, in fact, the compensation of even mine and the senior leadership team is tied to it. But the systematic changes is something that I have to take direct responsibility for. But it's everyone's responsibility at the

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company to actually live up to what we espouse as our core cultural meme. So in your book, you gave a specific example of how to detect a healthy engineering culture. I remember you talked about diversity and inclusion. I think you talked about

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engineers with different skill sets from different silos all working together, one Microsoft. And that's very different from at least the stories about Microsoft in some period of time. So how did you move from one place to the other? This is actually

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a fascinating thing. You know, there is... Inside of the company, we had gotten ourselves organized into what I would say is business units. And one of the things about business units is it's sort of awesome if the categories

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are stable, except they're terrible when you actually have to sort of reconflate all of the capability into a new category.

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And also software has this attribute called the Conway's Law. Essentially it follows the org structure. And so you want in fact the malleability of your organization to help you change the products you build, the categories you build. And so as I say, if

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you sort of wait for the next reorganization, to build a new product, then you're done for. But then what does it mean? How do you give yourself permission? And that's where this one Microsoft comes in. Quite frankly, we did make some structural changes.

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So for example, in fact, Steve in his last face at Microsoft was the one who instigated saying, look, I want to make sure that we are able to now reinvent Microsoft for the next era. That means we went functional. which is

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at our scale, it was sort of a huge management challenge. 100,000. 100,000 people, think about all of us working essentially, here's marketing, here's business dev, here's sales, here's R&D. Of course there was capability, there's silicon, like right now, Microsoft, we have

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silicon capability to cloud. And our innovation in some sense has no bounds in terms of capability. It's the specific decisions we make on how to exercise it.

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We can bring people together, but we have to first give ourselves permission and not tie ourselves to a set of category definitions and how we marked progress had to be changed. You can mark progress by looking essentially at metrics that are

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measuring progress on a previous category when you have to come together in a completely new way. So you also talked about empathy. and its role at Microsoft specifically, and its role in choosing the products and services that you're gonna create

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and the impact they're gonna have. And that also struck me. It seems like the antithesis of what engineers think about, at least famously. And you yourself gave a story of answering an interview question about empathy in a way that I think you'd

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revisit. Yes, absolutely. So could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, it's actually interesting, Marty, Most people, when you think about empathy, you say, wow, I reserve it for the select few people in my life. Except when I think about

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the core business of Microsoft, what is it? It's about creating products or innovating so that you can meet unmet, unarticulated needs of customers. That's what it's all about. You reflect on this, which is, wow, unmet, unarticulated. Sounds hard. It seems hard. That means I better listen.

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But not just listen to the words, but listen to the deeper sense of need behind the words. That's very active listening. That requires empathy.

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Empathy for the context. Then you say, well... I can't just go to work and switch on this button called the empathy button, and then I'm gonna be empathetic and all of my innovation's gonna come because I switched this button on. So to

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me, that's where it led me to believe that the best way to innovate is to have empathy, and the best way to develop this empathy is to essentially listen and learn from your own life's experience. If I think about my own journey, that first interview question, the interview question,

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after I went through whatever, eight interviews throughout the day at Microsoft, the last interviewer's last question was, what would you do if a child has fallen in front of you on the street? And then I thought, oh God, this is some search

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algorithm I didn't learn. And I was like, thank God, I can't remember this. So I fumbled a little bit and then I said, you know, I'll call 911. And so this guy who was interviewing me gets up. He

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gets up and he walks me out and he says, I think, my friend, you'll need to develop a sense of empathy because when a child has fallen on the ground, you pick them up and hug them. And I thought that was it.

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There was no way I was getting the offer. Then call 911. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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And... But it stuck with me. And I think that's what it is. It's not like I was born with some innate capability.

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If anything, it is whether it's that interview question, the birth of my son, or whether it is my answer to even the Grace Hopper question that was asked of me about women in pain. These are all places that taught me a much better,

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like wow, how could I be out of touch, blind to this, how do I develop a more understanding of where the question is coming from or the need is coming from? And all of us can do that. And if we integrate what we

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learn in our life and bring that to work, then your ability to meet the unmet, unarticulated needs of customers is gonna be that much more tuned. I think that that's the most robust strategy, as computer scientists would call it, to go get that

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innovation wheel going. And so would you share that Grace Hopper pay and women story? Sure. Fascinating one. You know, I was pretty excited to go to Grace Hopper. This was, I think, the first year I was CEO. And the

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question was asked, what would my advice be to someone who was not keen on asking for a raise? And I went back to my own history and gave essentially a nonsensical answer because I was really not answering the real, I would say,

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need, trauma, agony behind that question. I mean, if you think about it, I'm CEO of Microsoft. What is expected of me? is not to reflect on my own past experience. Who cares? In some sense, it is sort of immaterial. I had to

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sort of understand that, look, my responsibility is to create an environment where there is equal pay for equal work. But in fact, it doesn't even stop there.

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It is about creating equal opportunity for equal work. And then what have I done inside of the company to create that environment, right? I mean, if you take some of the real challenges any women at work has, which is

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they bear more of the burden of child bearing. And if you sort of say, wow, if you take a maternity leave and you come back, what is the the system going to do to help us get back to where we left?

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How can we get promoted? Those are some of the more challenging issues, more of the things that the system needs to support. So I think I learned a ton and quite frankly, It was sort of acted as the inspiration for me and

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instigation for us as a company to do a lot more and get more proactive and even metric driven. And in fact, since it's the Goldman connection, when I came back, Amy Hood, who was an ex-Goldman alumni, who's our CFO, and Kathleen Hogan, who runs our HR, and Peggy Johnson, who runs

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BizDev, these are very senior successors successful women who are in my leadership team, and when I even went back and talked to them, is when I, I was shocked to learn how much they had to overcome in order to get to where they

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are. And I think that that's why it's so important for us to be able to take this diversity and inclusion, I would say, in today's day and age, if we believe that we want to get the best out of all of the people

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we have, is an amazing opportunity for us to do our best work, to create an environment in where that happens. So you mentioned organizing Microsoft in a different dimension, a functional dimension, and meeting the unarticulated needs of your customers. And then also, I know you

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mentioned in the book something that also caught my attention, which is don't believe anyone who's predicting the future of technology. I think you said something of that form. And yet we see these wild things happening. I know you worked on your

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graduate work on problems in parallel computation. I did as well. And then that field kind of went nowhere for a very long time. And we even became embarrassed to say artificial intelligence. Even today, I can hardly make myself say it. We rebranded it

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as machine learning. And it seems really important. And yet no one knows exactly where it's going and how fast. And so that's one trend you call out. You also mentioned quantum computing, which seems even more like science fiction actually in some ways, but

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arguably close at hand. And mixed reality, which also gets mixed up with augmented reality and virtual reality. So would you talk a little bit about those trends, what you're doing about it, and if you have any views for us, because some of these things affect us too. Absolutely. You know, you're

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right in sense, predicting technology and futures is one of the more scary things because the general theme is that you will overestimate what you get done in the short run and underestimate what you do in the long run. But these three broad things I'm pretty excited about and I

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think they're absolutely very relevant to what you're trying to get done. Let's start with sort of mixed reality because if you look at even, the biggest shifts are always inspired by new input-output. Whether it's the mouse and the keyboard, or touch,

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or ink, or what have you. So when I think about what's the ultimate input-output, it's really going to be input-output that's always there in front of your eyes. So that's why I think of what is, to me, the difference between virtual reality and

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augmented reality is like a dial of opacity that you set. You want to see the world and that world is intersposed with virtual, or you want to be completely occluded and fully immersed in a virtual world. So mixed

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reality means you can set the dial anywhere along the end of the email? That's correct. That's correct. So that's kind of, but the broader theme that we are building towards is essentially a multi-device, multi-sense world. You can start on voice. In fact, if you put on a headset, whether it's one of

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those Windows mixed reality headsets or a HoloLens, the interface is gaze, gestures, voice. And you may start with one device with one input, and end up with an output on another device. So that's sort of one piece. The

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second piece is AI, because the way to create the experiences that are going to be multi-sense, multi-device, is going to be by reasoning over large amounts of data. which is obviously very, very relevant. I mean, you talk about you

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are the company that understands risk, and there's no way you're going to understand risk without actually reasoning over all of the things that are going to give you predictive power on risk. You can call it machine learning, you can call it AI, but

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that, I think, is going to be core to pretty much everything that we do.

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going forward, and it's very exciting to see some of the advances that have come, especially in perception, with speech and object recognition. I think we are still far from really breaking through our natural language and true understanding of text,

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and that I think is the, that's why I think sometimes we should rightfully celebrate.

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This time around, I don't think we are gonna go back to the AI winter that perhaps both of us observed before, But also overly congratulating ourselves because of some breakthroughs. Before we truly break through on natural language, I think

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that's work ahead. And quantum, I would say first of all, is probably the one thing that's a little more out there. And there are lots of, for example, we're in the cloud era. We're gonna go to the cloud, which is gonna be much

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more distributed with the edge. We're gonna go to serverless. The one thing that this new world requires is not less computing, it requires more computing.

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And here's the fun fascinating thing. If you look at it, the Moore's law itself has got challenges, we all know that. But if you look at some of the problems that we face today, climate change, I mean to try and say let me

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design the catalyst that can absorb the carbon in the air, right? That's a math problem or a computation problem that can't be solved by the one Neumann machine in the finite time. And so we need new computers.

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And so we've taken a pretty novel approach to quantum where we've said let us in fact build a general purpose quantum computer. That means you need to have enough qubits stabilized. So we're betting on this field of math called the topological

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approach. Tell us a bit about that, why you chose that. Well, this is where you reach my limits of understanding. But here is the fundamental, there's a Fields Medal winner at math at Microsoft called Michael Friedman. He was explaining this to me and

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he said, hey, do you know your square roots? And I said, well, I hope so. But it's square roots of imaginary numbers are sort of the keys to how you create these quantum knots essentially to stabilize these qubits.

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Now, well that's great, that's fantastic math. Now the question is you need to be able to actually find the physical instantiation of it. So that's why we have some world-class physicists working to find this topological matter.

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in quantum physics. And so there's these Majorana particles that have now been discovered as exhibiting topological matter. And so it requires us to sort of now create all of the conditions to build these Majorana particles at scale.

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And then of course you need a complete new software stack, right? I mean, as I said, the one diamond machine is no longer valid, so you need a new, in fact, on that context, just this week, we launched the quantum simulator. So you

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can fire up Visual Studio and anyone who's into algorithms and like the algorithms you and I learned, now we'll have to relearn them because none of that applies in the quantum world. And so we said, okay, let's build like, which is very classic

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Microsoft, start with a language. We have Qsharp now for quantum algorithms. It's integrated into an IDE in Visual Studio. We have a simulator in Azure. This is all available.

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It's all available. And I think we've got to prepare ourselves starting there. But we're excited about what it could mean. I think of it as a spender of whatever, $10 billion in capital in Azure. To me, this is just the next

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Azure computer. in terms of logical progression. That makes sense. So as you're doing all of these things and this is a challenge that we face and maybe every company faces it, the infamous innovators dilemma, how you attend to the

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requirements of your current customers and the needs they're articulating today and the businesses that are generating your profits for your shareholders today while And there's so many schools of thoughts. Do you incubate? Do you do it within your building? Do you

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do it in a separate building? Is it bean bags and dress codes? Is it a divisional structure? How do you insulate them from the returns pressure of the bigger firm in the quarterly cycle? Can you? That's a great, I

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mean. It's a lot of questions. And obviously the answer is not simple or there isn't a formula. But I can tell you a little bit of our own journey through this, and at least my reflections are a couple. One is it's so

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much easier to deal with just, I would say, a very disruptive technology change than with a business model change. When you sort of say suddenly you've got to not only deal with the new technology, which in many cases, if you have a capable enough team, it's not the biggest issue. But

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when you say, oh, you know what, this new world is gonna have like half the margins or quarter of the margins that you have today and you should be fine with it, that's when the real issue is. And it doesn't matter. You can

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sit around and think that I'm somehow going to play defense. And just once the genie's out of the bottle, it's done. It's not like you can deny the market's expectation of what needs to be done on the business model side. And

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for us, for example, on the cloud side, which I write about, it was a real dilemma. We had a very successful server business. By the way, I grew up in our server business. In fact, one of my first trips starting out in 1992

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was to Goldman. I had to sit outside, obviously, in a very different building and sort of wait my turn to sort of see because I was coming from a PC company and people at Goldman were saying, hey, what does this guy have to

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do with sort of servers? And then we built it up. you know, over a period of 20 years into a very successful business. And then yet, we knew by looking at what Amazon was doing that we needed to reinvent ourselves. And by

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the way, the margins were gonna be very, very different. Tough challenge. In fact, Steve was the one who gave me all the confidence because I was running that business unit to in some sense go and boldly reinvent that business. When

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Amazon already had billions of dollars. Well, I mean, I don't think it was even then, they were not that far ahead. It was not actually that conventional wisdom outside.

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That's the key, by the way. it's conventional wisdom, that this is the new business model, you have to have the wherewithal to have recognized it and moved. In our case, we did that. I wish we had started even earlier. You always do. Like always. But in some sense, being an incumbent,

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even if you don't disrupt yourself because of the innovator's dilemma, but you've got to be great at responding to these shifts in business model is probably the biggest lesson I've learned as an incumbent. And if you're a disruptor, it's easy. Because you can

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always say, hey, you can come in and you luck into that business model that scales. So that was the tough challenge, at least we have learned. And so now when I look at it, I'm always watchful. is to never fall in love with

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your current margin structure. And you've gotta always have a thesis of what are the things that are going to perhaps be the next bend in the curve around that and then how do you respond? So there's a topic that I'm sure it's on

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your mind and you do talk about it in your book. It's certainly on our minds, which is data privacy. We see some really stark differences between, say, the financial services industry and parts of the technology industry, where we have to be exquisitely careful about the

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appropriate use of our customers' data. They all want us to use the data to give them a better experience. And this is a super hard problem and I'm not sure that many Silicon Valley companies have really addressed it head on, but I know you are. So can you tell us a little

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bit about that? It's a very interesting thing. I think if you say, well, the surplus that's gonna get generated, whether at an individual company level or even at an economy and a societal level is going to be because of data. Yes.

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That means right next to that data and all your AI reasoning around it comes privacy. Because unless and until you can say that that surplus gets created and distributed to those who own the data. Yes, and anonymizing it is not enough. Exactly. So

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the first thing I've realized, for example, at Microsoft is it's not just, I can go on and on and we'll talk a little bit about the technology. It starts with the trust in Microsoft's business model.

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When an automotive company, I'll pick that, says, okay, I'm gonna trust the Microsoft Cloud to be able to do my reasoning. Take all my data from my self-driving work or my connected car work and put it into your cloud. Use your FPGAs or

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GPUs or NPUs to build models. In fact, I'll take some of your models and derive from it. They want to trust that we won't turn around and suddenly start competing with them by building cars. Same thing in drug discovery,

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same thing anyone who's got consumer behavioral data can say, let me be in the risk business. And so one of the fundamentals of sort of, I sort of take from privacy the broader thing of building trust. Trust in

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Microsoft's business model so others can trust that what we help them do with data is not going to then allow us to go in and compete with them. That's kind of the first thing to be principled about. Then after that, I think it's

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to recognize, for example, even with Office 365, one of the biggest unlocks is not about moving Exchange to online SaaS service. It's sort of, yeah, fine, that's an interesting thing. It's about being able to unlock the insights inside of the data. But that's not our data. It is your data.

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You then live under all of the various jurisdictions and data residency. I mean, Goldman, in fact, you are very, very, very stringent about it. Okay, what about the inboxes in Germany? Where is that data? Who gets to sort of reason about it? We've

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learned a ton, for example, getting the EU model clause clearance in the 29 states at that time and saying, okay, we not only need to bring the customer in, But we need to bring the regulator in with the customer. And

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that means we've created features in our products so the regulators have access to the tenant's data and be able to have the ability to do audit and so on.

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So we are trying to systematically build trust. But the principle is that it's about helping customers to recognize value in their data and recognize that even there is two orders of sort of distance, which is you have, Goldman could be on our cloud, but Goldman is operating on data which is

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your customer's data, and you have to have the ability to preserve privacy all the way through. And I think that the technical answers are getting better and better, but I think what is going to be important is for people to be able to

Speaker A

have that framework of business model trust, where if you suddenly start saying, wow, that somehow that data or the model, which was the meta model off of my data, is leaking in somewhere else, then that's problematic. You don't have a business in that

Speaker A

case. So we have a very short amount of time, so I thought we might do a lightning round. Okay. Favorite app on your phone?

Speaker A

For me, it's now LinkedIn and maybe Minecraft. And which phone? It's any phone with a lot of my software in it.

Speaker A

Oh, wow. I'll ask you afterwards. Favorite Starbucks drink? Doppio Macchiato. Best technology invention of the past 10 years? I would say touch and software-defined data center. And best technology invention of the next 10 years? It's software-defined everything. I agree with you on that. Who,

Speaker A

apart from Bill and Steve, do you most look up to in the technology world?

Speaker A

I'd say, I mean, there's clearly what Jeff Bezos has done at Amazon, I would say, is probably one of the amazing stories of the recent past. But I'm a great admirer of anyone who creates...

Speaker A

on new categories, but are not overnight successes. But we've gone through this period of 10, 15 years where people were saying, what is this business all about? But have been able to turn and sort of say, wow, this is something

Speaker A

that is an enduring hit. And the best advice you ever received? You know, one of the things that I've... You know, there was this meeting we had at the board after I'd become CEO where everyone went around and

Speaker A

sort of said, you know, let's give this new guy some advice. And Steve's turn came. And Steve sort of looks at me and he says, be bold and be right. And so if you're not, if you're not bold, you're not going to

Speaker A

do anything meaningful. and if you're not right, you'll be dead. And so in some sense, that's the balance. And so I've always thought that that's like, oh, that's pretty tough, but it's great advice. Sayyid, thank you so much. Thank you so

Speaker A

much Mariah.

Topics:Satya NadellaMicrosofttransformationgrowth mindsetcompany culturetechnology leadershipdiversity and inclusioncloud computingcorporate culturechange management

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main theme of Satya Nadella's talk at Goldman Sachs?

The main theme is transformation, focusing on how individuals and organizations like Microsoft must adapt to change through culture and a growth mindset.

How does Satya Nadella define the role of culture in a company's success?

Nadella describes culture as a virtuous cycle intertwined with a company's concept and capabilities, which must be explicit to foster new ideas and continuous innovation.

Why is the growth mindset important according to Satya Nadella?

The growth mindset encourages continuous learning and confronting fixed mindsets, which helps both individuals and organizations adapt and thrive amid change.

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