Nadella counts on culture shock
Microsoft CEO has made major changes in his three years
In March of last year, the company unveiled Tay.ai, a Twitter bot aimed at ushering in a new era of human-toartificial-intelligence conversation. Within hours, hackers turned Tay into a venom-spewing racist and the company quickly shut down the not ready for prime time product. In the old days of Microsoft, heads surely would have rolled. But Satya Nadella, 49, a one-time company engineer who took the reins of the $500 billion tech giant three years ago this month, sent the Tay team a note of encouragement.
“Keep pushing, and know that I am with you,” he wrote in an email. “All new things are hard. Any internal and external feedback is good and criticism is also something we take in the right spirit with deep empathy for anyone hurt by Tay. And (the) key is to keep learning and improving.”
The team responded with Zo, a new AI chatbot that debuted in December. So far, no issues.
“It’s so critical for leaders not to freak people out, but to give them air cover to solve the real problem,” Nadella said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY. “If people are doing things out of fear, it’s hard or impossible to actually drive any innovation.”
A seismic cultural shift is rocking Microsoft, one that Nadella sees as critical to pivoting away from an atrophying software license-based past and towards a cloud-based enterprise future.
“What I realize more than ever now is that my job is curation of our culture,” he says. “If you don’t focus on creating a culture that allows people to do their best work, then you’ve created nothing.”
Innovation is the lifeblood of any company, but especially those that traffic in the fickle world of technology. For every Facebook there’s also a Yahoo, a shooting comet that passed on a chance to buy Google and thought digital magazines would save the day.
For this one-time tech monolith now grappling with reinvention, a cultural shift capable of spawning revenue-generating ideas is no mere nice-to-have makeover. It’s vital to the company’s future.
“You have cloud massive growth in one direction, but drag from phone hardware and a move away from licensing, so there are a lot of things against them,” says Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research.
“They’ve done well to get back to parity, but you won’t see the
“What I realize more than ever now is that my job is curation of our culture.” Satya Nadella
seven majority-Muslim nations. Tech companies, which made up the majority of the 100-plus who signed the brief, often employ engineers from overseas.
Nearly 80 Microsoft employees were affected by the ban, which suddenly restricted entry into the U.S. for travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations.
Nadella explains that his own life story exemplified both the positive power of multinational corporations as well as the virtue of U.S. immigration policies.
“It was actually Microsoft products that introduced me to computing, which then helped me dream the dream, and then America’s enlightened immigration policy helped me live the dream,” he says. “And so I think that in some sense every country should always put their own national interests first.”
Nadella says that whether he’s meeting with Trump or India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “my job as a CEO of a multinational company is to be able to clearly articulate how Microsoft is responsibly working in each of those countries to create economic opportunity for their people, their businesses and their interests.”