Hit Refresh

Satya Nadella writes as the third chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, in the midst of a corporate transformation. The book weaves together three storylines: Nadella's personal journey from India to America, the cultural and strategic renewal of Microsoft under his leadership, and the technological shifts he believes will reshape society, including artificial intelligence (AI), mixed reality, and quantum computing.

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, drawn by a company on a mission to change the world. Over the following decades, however, he watched innovation give way to bureaucracy and internal politics. When the board named him CEO on February 4, 2014, he told employees that renewing the company's culture was his highest priority.

Nadella's emphasis on empathy is rooted in personal experience. During his 1992 job interview, a manager named Richard Tait asked what he would do if he saw a baby crying in the street. Nadella answered that he would call 911. Tait told him he needed more empathy: Just pick up the baby. A few years later, Nadella's wife, Anu, noticed reduced fetal movement during her pregnancy. An emergency cesarean delivered their son, Zain, at three pounds. Zain was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy caused by oxygen deprivation before birth, requiring a wheelchair and lifelong care. Nadella initially felt devastated, but Anu helped him understand the situation was about Zain's experience, not theirs, fostering a deepening empathy that Nadella carries into his leadership. He discovered the teachings of Gautama Buddha, particularly the concept of impermanence, which helped him develop equanimity. At work, empathy drove the development of eye-gaze tracking technology for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and cerebral palsy; the project emerged from Microsoft's first employee hackathon, an event where employees rapidly build prototype ideas.

Nadella's childhood in India shapes his worldview. His father, a civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), valued intellectual curiosity. His mother, a Sanskrit scholar, prioritized happiness and contentment. Cricket became Nadella's consuming passion, and three leadership principles crystallized from the sport: compete vigorously in the face of intimidation, put the team ahead of personal recognition, and build confidence in those you lead. After studying electrical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology, Nadella entered a master's program in computer science at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He worked briefly at Sun Microsystems, then joined Microsoft in 1992 as an evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system, while earning a business degree at the University of Chicago. Nadella and Anu, whose families were longtime friends, married in December 1992. When Anu's visa was rejected, Nadella gave up his green card and reverted to H1B temporary worker status because H1B rules allowed spouses to enter the United States.

By 2008, PC shipments had leveled off while Apple and Google smartphones surged. Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services, establishing itself as the leader in cloud computing, which allows businesses to rent data storage and processing power rather than maintaining their own servers. Microsoft lacked a commercially viable cloud platform. Steve Ballmer, then CEO, asked Nadella to lead the online search business that became Bing. Building Bing taught Nadella distributed computing, consumer product design, two-sided markets, and applied machine learning. He recruited Dr. Qi Lu from Yahoo to lead online services, backing the hire despite it stalling his own promotion because he recognized the value of learning from Qi Lu. In January 2011, Ballmer asked Nadella to lead the server and tools business. Nadella moved Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, from a side project into the mainstream, provided first-class Linux support, and renamed the product from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure to signal openness. A "live site first" culture developed around the service, meaning the team prioritized keeping it running and rapidly fixing outages.

Ballmer announced his retirement in August 2013. On the day of Nadella's formal introduction as CEO, employee polls revealed most workers doubted the company's direction. Nadella told employees the industry respects innovation, not tradition, and challenged them to discover what would be lost if Microsoft disappeared. In a July 2014 all-company email, he declared Microsoft "the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world," meaning the mobility of human experience across devices powered by cloud intelligence, and defined the new mission as empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. He outlined three business ambitions: reinventing productivity and business processes, building an intelligent cloud platform, and creating more personal computing through Windows 10. The Nokia phone acquisition, announced before Nadella became CEO and which he voted against, closed after he took office. Microsoft wrote off the acquisition entirely and eliminated nearly 18,000 jobs.

Drawing on Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Nadella introduces the growth mindset as Microsoft's cultural framework, defined through three practices: obsessing about customers with curiosity and empathy, actively seeking diversity and inclusion, and operating as One Microsoft rather than a confederation of fiefdoms. The annual hackathon during OneWeek, Microsoft's companywide event week, became a cultural institution; one team built tools to help students with dyslexia by breaking words into syllables and highlighting text for read-aloud. The Minecraft acquisition for $2.5 billion exemplifies the growth mindset: Xbox head Phil Spencer maintained a relationship with Swedish game studio Mojang after an initial deal fell through, and when Mojang came up for sale again, Microsoft acquired it.

At the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing, Nadella was asked for advice for women uncomfortable asking for a raise and responded that women should trust the system and that not asking is "good karma." The answer drew immediate criticism. He emailed the entire company acknowledging he answered completely wrong, affirming equal pay for equal work. The incident prompted Microsoft to link executive compensation to diversity progress.

Nadella argues that healthy partnerships, including with competitors, are essential. Apple approached Microsoft to optimize Office 365 for the iPad Pro. Microsoft partnered with Google, Red Hat, and Amazon, among others, and ended longstanding regulatory battles with Google by issuing a joint statement committing to compete on product merits. The LinkedIn acquisition for $26 billion in 2016 grew out of more than six years of partnership, with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner citing Microsoft's increasing agility and purpose-driven culture as key factors.

Looking beyond the cloud, Nadella identifies three transformative technologies: mixed reality, AI, and quantum computing. He describes his first experience with HoloLens, a self-contained head-mounted computer created by Brazilian-born engineer Alex Kipman that virtually transported him onto the surface of Mars. In AI, Microsoft set the accuracy record for phone call transcription and applied machine learning to discover weak links in HIV and cancer. In quantum computing, which leverages quantum physics to create qubits that perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers, Microsoft developed topological qubits at Station Q, its research lab in Santa Barbara, that are naturally less error-prone.

Nadella argues that privacy, security, and free speech must anchor trust in the digital age. He recounts Microsoft's decisions to release a film targeted by North Korean hackers despite the risk of cyberattack, to co-found the Reform Government Surveillance alliance after the Snowden revelations, to challenge a U.S. order to turn over email data stored in Ireland, and to support Apple when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought to force the company to unlock a shooter's iPhone, since a mandated backdoor would weaken security for all users. On AI ethics, Nadella proposes that AI must assist humanity, be transparent, protect privacy, and have algorithmic accountability so that humans can undo unintended harm. He identifies empathy, education, creativity, and judgment as essential human skills for the AI era.

Nadella contends that technology must drive more inclusive economic growth, presenting a simplified equation: education plus innovation, multiplied by intensity of technology use, produces economic growth over time. He recommends broad Internet access, investment in human capital and vocational training, and continued free trade. In the afterword, he calls for a new social contract for the age of AI and automation, redefines the CEO's role as curator of culture, and reframes the employer-employee relationship: Microsoft no longer employs people; people employ Microsoft, using the company as a platform for their personal passions. All proceeds from the book go to Microsoft Philanthropies, the company's charitable arm focused on digital skills, Internet access, and humanitarian aid.