Читать книгу Hit Refresh: A Memoir by Microsoft’s CEO - Satya Nadella - Страница 9

I am obsessed with cricket. No matter where I am, this beautiful game is always in the back of my mind. The joy, the memories, the drama, the complexities, and the ups and downs—the infinite possibilities.

For those of you unfamiliar with cricket, it is an international sport played on a large green oval in the summer and early fall. Its popularity is strongest among the current and former nations of the British Commonwealth. Like baseball, in cricket a ball is hurled at a batter who endeavors to strike the ball and score as many runs as possible. The pitcher is a bowler, the batter is a batsman, the diamond is a wicket, and the fielders try to get the batsman out. Yes, there are forms of a match that can stretch on for days, but then in baseball teams compete to win 3-, 5-, and even 7-game series. Both sports are endlessly complex, but suffice it to say that the team with the most runs wins. This is not the book to describe the ins and outs of cricket, but it is a book that cannot avoid the metaphor of cricket and business.

Like most South Asians, I somehow fell in love with this most English of games on the dusty matting wickets of the Deccan Plateau in southern India.

There, on those fields, I learned a lot about myself—succeeding and failing as a bowler, a batsman, and a fielder. Even today I catch myself reflecting on the nuances within the cricket rulebook and the inherent grace of a team of eleven working together as one unit.

During the early years of my life when my father’s work as a civil servant took us to the district headquarters of Andhra Pradesh and the hills of Mussoorie in what is now Uttarakhand, cricket was not the phenomenon it is now. Today the Indian Premier League sells its ten-year television rights for billions. But back then it became a phenomenon for me, when at the age of eight, we moved to Hyderabad. We stayed in a rented house in the Somajiguda neighborhood, and our landlord, Mr. Ali, was a gracious and proud Hyderabadi, who wore his Osmania University cricket cap while working in his auto shop. He was full of stories about all the great Hyderabadi cricketers of the 1960s. He once took me to watch a first-class match between Hyderabad and Bombay (today’s Mumbai). It was my first time in the great cricket stadium Fateh Maidan. I was completely smitten that day with all the glamour of cricket. The athletes, M. L. Jaisimha, Abbas Ali Baig, Abid Ali, and Mumtaz Hussain, became my heroes. The Bombay side had Sunil Gavasker and Ashok Mankad, among many other stars. I don’t recall any of them making much of an impression, even though they beat Hyderabad handily. I was in awe of M. L. Jaisimha’s on-field presence—his fashionable upturned collar and distinctive gait. To this day I remember Mr. Ali’s descriptions of Mumtaz Hussain’s “mystery ball,” and watching Abid Ali charging down the wicket to a medium pacer.

Soon my dad was again transferred in his job, and I moved to attend school in Delhi. There I watched my first Test match at Feroz Shah Kotla. It was a match between India and England. Watching these two sides play left an indelible impression. I remember the English batsman Dennis Amiss and bowler John Lever combined to destroy India by an inning, leaving me distraught for weeks. Amiss hit a double hundred, and Lever, playing in his first Test match, bowled medium pace through that long afternoon, and the ball was swinging for him like I’d never seen before. Suddenly all the Indian players were back in the hut.

When I was ten I returned to Hyderabad, and for the next six years I truly and surely fell in love with cricket as a player for Hyderabad Public School (HPS). In fact, Mr. Jaisimha’s two children attended my school, and as a result we were surrounded by cricket glamour, tradition, and obsession. In those days, everyone was talking about the two India School players from HPS. One of them was Saad Bin Jung (who also happened to be the famous Indian cricket captain, Tiger Pataudi’s, nephew). Still in school, he went on to smash a hundred runs against a touring West Indian side while playing for South Zone, representing our region of southern India. I began playing on the B team and graduated to the senior team, which played in the A leagues of Hyderabad. We were the only school team to play in the A leagues as the other teams were sponsored by banks and miscellaneous companies. Ranji Trophy players would turn up in these league games, and all that intrigue made for intense competition.

What excited me then about cricket is what still excites me today, even living in a non-cricketing country (though, the United States over a hundred years ago did periodically host Australian and English sides). Cricket for me is like a wondrous Russian novel with plots and subplots played out over the course of multiple acts. In the end, one brilliant knock, or three deftly bowled balls, can change the complexion of a game.

There are three stories from my all-too-brief cricketing past that speak very directly to business and leadership principles I use even today as a CEO.

The first principle is to compete vigorously and with passion in the face of uncertainty and intimidation. In my school cricketing days, we played a team one summer that had several Australian players. During the match, our PE teacher, who acted as a sort of general manager for the team, noticed that we were admiring the Aussies’ play. In fact, we were more than a little intimidated by them. We had never played against foreign players, and Australia of course loomed large in the national cricket psyche. I now recognize our teacher and general manager as very much like an American football coach—loud and very competitive. He was having none of our admiration and intimidation. He began by yelling at the captain to get more aggressive. I was a bowler and a terrible fielder but he positioned me at forward short leg, right beside the powerful Australian batsmen. I would have been happy standing far away, but he put me right next to the action. In time, with new energy and new focus, we transformed into a competitive team. It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.

On reflection, a second principle is simply the importance of putting your team first, ahead of your personal statistics and recognition. One of my teams had a brilliant fast bowler. He was one of the most promising young cricketers in the land. He became even greater after attending a U-19 South Zone coaching clinic. His pace and accuracy were just brilliant. As a tail-end batsman myself, being in the nets (similar to baseball batting cages) against this guy was tough. But he had a self-destructive mindset. During one game our captain decided to replace him with another bowler. Soon, the new bowler coaxed the opposing batsman to mis-hit a ball skyward, an easy catch for our cantankerous teammate now at mid-off, a fielding position twenty-five to thirty yards from the batsman. Rather than take a simple catch, he plunged both hands deep into his pockets and watched passively as the ball fell right in front of him. He was a star player, and we looked on in complete disbelief. The lesson? One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.

There are of course many lessons and principles one can take from cricket, but for me a third is the central importance of leadership. Looking back, I remember one particular match in which my off-spin bowling was getting hammered by the opponents. I was serving up very ordinary stuff. Our team captain in retrospect showed me what real leadership looks like. When my over had ended (that is, when I had thrown six balls), he replaced me with himself even though he was a better batsman than bowler. He quickly took the wicket—the batsman was out. Customarily taking a wicket that efficiently would argue for him remaining in as a bowler. But instead, he immediately handed the ball back to me and I took seven wickets of my own. Why did he do it? I surmised he wanted me to get my confidence back. It was early in the season and he needed me to be effective all year. He was an empathetic leader, and he knew that if I lost my confidence it would be hard to get it back. That is what leadership is about. It’s about bringing out the best in everyone. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of an individual and a team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading. That team captain went on to play many years of prestigious Ranji Trophy competition, and he taught me a very valuable lesson.

Those early lessons from cricket shaped my leadership style, as have my experiences as a husband, a father, a young Microsoft engineer thrilled to be part of our company’s visionary ascent, and later as an executive charged with building new businesses. My approach has never been to conduct business as usual. Instead it’s been to focus on culture and imagine what’s possible. The culmination of these experiences has provided the raw material for the transformation we are undergoing today—a set of principles based on the alchemy of purpose, innovation, and empathy.

* * *

The arrival of our son, Zain, in August 1996 had been a watershed moment in Anu’s and my life together. His suffering from asphyxia in utero, had changed our lives in ways we had not anticipated. We came to understand life’s problems as something that cannot always be solved in the manner we want. Instead we had to learn to cope. When Zain came home from the intensive care unit (ICU), Anu internalized this understanding immediately. There were multiple therapies to be administered to him every day, not to mention quite a few surgeries he needed that called for strenuous follow-up care after nerve-racking ICU stays. All this entailed Anu lovingly placing him in the infant car seat and driving him, day after day, from the early hours of the day, from therapist to therapist, not to mention frequent visits to the ICU unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Children’s became a second home for our family as Zain’s medical file grew to over a foot high. We are today, as we always have been, so indebted to the staff at Children’s who have loved and cared for Zain throughout his life from infancy to young adulthood.

During one ICU visit, after I took on my new role as CEO, I looked around Zain’s room, filled with the soft buzzing and beeping of medical technology, and saw things differently. I noticed just how many of the devices ran on Windows and how they were increasingly connected to the cloud, that network of massive data storage and computational power that is now a fundamental part of the technology applications we take for granted today. It was a stark reminder that our work at Microsoft transcended business, that it made life itself possible for a fragile young boy. It also brought a new level of gravity to the looming decisions back at the office on our cloud and Windows 10 upgrades. We’d better get this right, I remember thinking to myself.

My son’s condition requires that I draw daily upon the very same passion for ideas and empathy that I learned from my parents. And I do this both at home and at work. Whether I am meeting with people in Latin America, the Middle East, or one of the inner cities of America, I am always searching to understand people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Being an empathetic father, and bringing that desire to discover what is at the core, the soul, makes me a better leader.

But it is impossible to be an empathetic leader sitting in an office behind a computer screen all day. An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities. So many people around the world today depend on mobile and cloud technologies without knowing it. Hospitals, schools, businesses, and researchers rely on what’s referred to as the “public cloud”—an array of large-scale, privacy-protected computers and data services accessible over a public network. Cloud computing makes it possible to analyze vast quantities of data to produce specific insights and intelligence, converting guesswork and speculation into predictive power. It has the power to transform lives, companies, and societies.

Traveling the globe as CEO, I’ve seen example after example of this interplay between empathy and technology.

Both in the state where I was born and the state in which I now live, schools use the power of cloud computing to analyze large amounts of data to uncover insights that can improve dropout rates. In Andhra Pradesh in India, and in Tacoma, Washington, too many kids drop out of school. The problem is lack of resources, not lack of ambition. Cloud technology is helping improve outcomes for kids and families as intelligence from cloud data is now predicting which students are most likely to drop out of school so that resources can be focused on providing them the help they need.

Thanks to mobile and cloud technologies, a startup in Kenya has built a solar grid that people living on less than two dollars a day can lease to have safe, low-cost lighting and efficient cookstoves, replacing polluting and dangerous kerosene power. It’s an ingenious plan because the startup can effectively create a credit rating, a byproduct of the service, which, for the first time, gives these Kenyans access to capital. This innovative mobile phone payment system enables customers living in Kenya’s sprawling slums to make forty-cent daily payments for solar light, which in turn generates data that establishes a credit history to finance other needs.

A university in Greece, leveraging cloud data, is working with firefighters in that country to predict and prevent massive wildfires like the one in 2007 that killed eighty-four people and burned 670,000 acres. Firefighters are now armed with intelligence on the rate of the fire’s spread, intensity, movement of the perimeter, proximity to water supply, and microclimate weather forecasts from remote sensors, enabling them to catch fires early, saving lives and property.

In Sweden, researchers are using cloud technologies to ensure that children are screened earlier and more accurately for dyslexia, a reading disorder that impacts educational outcomes for millions. Eye movement data analyzed at schools today can be compared with a data set from those diagnosed with dyslexia thirty years ago. Diagnostic accuracy rates have increased from 70 to 95 percent, and the time to get a diagnosis has decreased from three years to three minutes. This means students, parents, and schools are prepared earlier and struggle less.

In Japan, crowd-sourced data collected from hundreds of sensors nationwide helped the public monitor radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant to reduce risks to food quality and transportation. The 13 million measurements from five hundred remote sensors generated a heat map that alerted authorities to threats to local rice production.

And in Nepal, after the devastating earthquake there in April 2015, disaster relief workers from the United Nations used the public cloud to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about schools, hospitals, and homes to speed up access to compensatory entitlements, relief packages, and other assistance.

Today it’s hard to imagine devices that are not connected to the cloud. Consumer applications like O365, LinkedIn, Uber, and Facebook all live in the cloud. There’s a great scene in Sylvester Stallone’s Creed, the latest of his Rocky movie series. The champ jots down on a piece of paper a workout regimen for his protégé, who quickly snaps a photo of it on his smartphone. As the kid jogs away, Rocky yells, “Don’t you want the paper?”

“I got it right here, it’s already up in the cloud,” the kid replies.

The aging Rocky looks skyward. “What cloud? What cloud?” Rocky may not know about the cloud, but millions of others rely on it.

Microsoft is at the leading edge of today’s game-changing cloud-based technologies. But just a few years ago, that outcome seemed very doubtful.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business.

The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution.

Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform.

All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search.

There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field. Always a bold, courageous, and famously enthusiastic leader, Steve called me one day to say he had an idea. He wanted me to become head of engineering for the online search and advertising business that would later be relaunched as Bing, one of Microsoft’s first businesses born in the cloud.

For context, search engines generate revenue through a form of advertising known as an auction. Advertisers bid on search keywords that match their product or service; the winning bid gets an opportunity to display a relevant advertisement on the search results page. Search for a car and a car dealership has likely paid to be displayed prominently on your results page. Delivering that purchase experience both from the consumer and the advertiser perspective is computationally expensive and sophisticated. And while Microsoft was struggling with low market share in search, Steve had invested in it because it would require the company to compete in a sector beyond Windows and Office and build great technology—which he saw as the future of our industry. There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join.

“You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.

Despite the warning, the job sounded intriguing. I was running an emerging new business within Microsoft Dynamics. I had taken over from Doug Burgum who later would become the governor of North Dakota. Doug was an inspirational leader who mentored me to become a more complete leader. He thought about business and work not in isolation but as part of a broader societal fabric and a core part of one’s life. Some of the lessons I learned from Doug are today an important part of who I am as a leader. Leading the Dynamics team was a dream job. For the first time, I was getting the chance to run a business end to end. I had spent nearly five years preparing for this job. I had all the relationships, inside and outside Microsoft, to drive the Dynamics business forward. But Steve’s offer was essentially pushing me out of my comfort zone. I’d never worked in a consumer-facing business and had not really tracked Microsoft’s search engine efforts or our early attempts to build cloud infrastructure. So one night, after a long day at work, I decided to drive over to Building 88, which housed the Internet search engineering team. I wanted to walk the hallways and see who these people were. How else could I empathize with the team I was being asked to lead? It was about 9 p.m., but the parking lot was packed. I’d expected to see a few stragglers finishing up their day but, no, the whole team was there working at their desks and eating take-out food. I didn’t really talk to anyone. But what I observed caused me to wonder: What gets people to work like this? Something important must be happening in Building 88.

Seeing the team that night, their commitment and dedication, clinched it for me. I told Steve, “Okay, I’m in.” What color was my parachute? I didn’t have one.

I was entering a new world, and the move proved to be fortuitous. Little did I know it would be my proving ground for future leadership and the future of the company.

Very quickly I realized we would need four essential skills to build an online, cloud-based business that would be accessed primarily from mobile phones rather than desktop computers.

First, I thought I knew a lot about distributed computing systems, but suddenly I realized I had to completely relearn these systems because of the cloud. A distributed system, simply put, is how software communicates and coordinates across networked computers. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people typing in search queries at the same time. If those queries landed in just one server somewhere in a room on the West Coast, it would break that server. But now imagine those queries being distributed evenly across a network of servers. The vast array of computing power would enable delivery of instant, relevant results to the consumer. And, if there’s more traffic, just add more servers. This elasticity is a core attribute of cloud computing architecture.

Second, we had to become great at consumer product design. We knew we needed great technology, but we also understood we needed a great experience, one you want to engage with time and again. Traditional software design mapped out what developers thought a product should look like in a year’s time, when it would finally go to market. Modern software design involves online products updated through continuous experimentation. Designers offer Web pages in “flights,” so an old version of Bing is delivered to some searchers while an untested new version reaches others. User scorecards determine which is the most effective. Sometimes, seemingly tiny differences can mean a lot. Something as simple as the color or size of a type font may profoundly impact the willingness of consumers to engage, triggering behavioral variations that may be worth tens of millions in revenue. Now Microsoft had to master this new approach to product design.

Third, we had to be great at understanding and building two-sided markets—the economics of a new online business. On one side are the consumers who go online for search results, and on the other side are the advertisers who want their businesses to be found. Both are needed to succeed. This creates the auction effect I was describing earlier. Both sides of the business are equally important, and designing the experience for both sides is crucial. Attracting more and more searchers obviously makes it easier to attract more and more advertisers. And showing the right advertisements is crucial to delivering relevant results. So, “bootstrapping” the online auction and improving search results’ relevance would prove to be a vital challenge.

Finally, we needed to be great at applied machine learning (ML). ML is a very rich form of data analytics that is foundational to artificial intelligence. We needed a sophisticated understanding of how to do two things at once—discern the intent of someone searching the Web and then match that intent with accurate knowledge gained from crawling the Web, ingesting and understanding information.

Ultimately, Bing would prove to be a great training ground for building the hyper-scale, cloud-first services that today permeate Microsoft. We weren’t just building Bing, we were building the foundational technologies that would fuel Microsoft’s future. Building Bing taught us about scale, experimentation-led design, applied ML, and auction-based pricing. These skills are not only mission critical at our company, but highly sought after throughout today’s technology universe.

But we started very much behind in search; we had yet to launch a product that could compete with Google. So I hit the road, meeting with executives from Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Apple to evangelize our emerging search engine. I wanted to make deals, but I also wanted to learn more about how they engineered their products to stay fresh. I found that the key was agility, agility, agility. We needed to develop speed, nimbleness, and athleticism to get the consumer experience right, not just once but daily. We needed to set and repeatedly meet short-term goals, shipping code at a more modern, fast-paced cadence.

To accomplish this, we needed to periodically gather all of the decision makers in a war-room setting. In September 2008 I called together the search engineers for the first of these meetings, which we casually called Search Checkpoint #1. (Perhaps we should have been more creative with the name, because it has stuck and now we’re at a checkpoint in the many hundreds.) We had decided to launch Bing in June 2009—a new search engine and a new brand. I learned a lot about creating urgency and mobilizing leaders with different skills and backgrounds toward one common goal in what was a new area for Microsoft. I realized that in a successful company it is as important to unlearn some old habits as it is to learn new skills.

My learning during this time was greatly accelerated by the hiring of Dr. Qi Lu as head of all online services at Microsoft. Qi had been an executive at Yahoo and was intensely recruited throughout Silicon Valley. Steve, Harry Shum, today our head of AI and research, and I had gone down to the Bay Area to spend an afternoon talking to Qi. On the flight back Steve said to me, “We should get him, but if you don’t want to work for him, that will be a problem.” Having just met with Qi, I knew that he was someone from whom I could learn a lot and Microsoft could benefit. So, I did not hesitate in supporting the hiring of Qi to Microsoft, even though in some sense it was stalling my own promotion. I realized that my own professional growth would come from working for and learning from Qi during my time in our online business. Later Qi would become an important member of my senior leadership team during the first few years I was CEO. Qi eventually left the company, but he continues to be a trusted friend and advisor.

Over time, Yahoo integrated Bing as its search engine, and together we powered a quarter of all U.S. searches. The search engine that many had said should be shuttered in its early days of struggle continued to win an expanding share of the market, and today it is a profitable multi-billion-dollar business for Microsoft. Just as important, though, was how it helped to jump-start our move to the cloud.

As was so often the case at Microsoft, there were other experiments elsewhere in the company aimed at the same problem, leading to internal competition and even fiefdoms. Since 2008, Ray Ozzie had been incubating a highly secretive cloud infrastructure product with the code name Red Dog. A longtime Microsoft reporter, Mary Jo Foley, came across a job advertisement for a Red Dog engineer and wrote a piece speculating that this project must be Microsoft’s answer to Amazon’s AWS.

At some point during my time at Bing, I met with the Red Dog team to explore how we might work together. I quickly realized that Microsoft’s storied server and tools business (STB), where products like Windows Server and SQL Server had been invented and built and where Red Dog was housed, was worlds apart from Bing. STB was Microsoft’s third largest group by revenue after Office and Windows. They were the deep distributed systems experts. But when I contrasted STB with Bing a few things were apparent. They lacked the feedback loop that comes from running an at-scale cloud service. I realized that they were caught up in the local maxima of servicing their existing customer base and were not learning fast enough about the new world of cloud services. And the Red Dog team was a side effort that was ignored by the mainstream of the STB leadership and organization.

In late 2010, Ray Ozzie announced in a long internal memo that he was leaving Microsoft. He wrote in his departure email, “The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must come from within.” While Red Dog was still in incubation and had booked little revenue, he was correct that the transformation of Microsoft would come from within. Steve had already proclaimed that the company was all-in on the cloud, having invested $8.7 billion in research and development, much of it focused on cloud technologies. But even though engineers were working on cloud-related technologies, a clear vision of a Microsoft cloud platform had not yet surfaced—to say nothing of a real-world revenue stream.

Right around that time, Steve asked that I lead STB, which today has evolved into Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise business. I was given this news of my new role not even a week before I got the job. Steve had a sense that we needed to move faster to the cloud. He had personally and aggressively driven the transformation of our Office business to the cloud. He wanted us to be equally bold when it came to cloud infrastructure. When I took over our fledgling cloud business in January 2011, analysts estimated that cloud revenues were already multi-billions of dollars with Amazon in the lead and Microsoft nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, revenues from our cloud services could be counted in the millions, not the billions. Although Amazon did not report its AWS revenues in those days, they were the clear leader, building a huge business without any real challenge from Microsoft. In his annual letter to shareholders in April 2011, just as I was beginning my new role, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gleefully offered a short course on the computer science and economics underlying their burgeoning cloud enterprise. He wrote about Bayesian estimators, machine learning, pattern recognition, and probabilistic decision making. “The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS),” he wrote. Amazon was leading a revolution and we had not even mustered our troops. Years earlier I had left Sun Microsystems to help Microsoft capture the lead in the enterprise market, and here we were once again far behind.

As a company, we’d been very publicly missing the mobile revolution, but we were not about to miss the cloud. I would miss working with colleagues at Bing, but I was excited to lead what I sensed would be the biggest transformation of Microsoft in a generation—our journey to the cloud. I had spent three years, from 2008 to 2011, learning the cloud—pressure-testing its infrastructure, operations, and economics—but as a user, not as a provider of the cloud. That experience would enable me to execute with speed in my new role.

But it wouldn’t be easy. The server and tools business was at the peak of its commercial success and yet it was missing the future. The organization was deeply divided over the importance of the cloud business. There was constant tension between diverging forces. On the one hand, the division’s leaders would say, “Yes, there is this cloud thing,” and “Yes, we should incubate it,” but, on the other hand, they would quickly shift to warning, “Remember, we’ve got to focus on our server business.” The servers that had made STB a force within Microsoft and the industry, namely Windows Server and SQL Server, were now holding them back, discouraging them from innovating and growing with the times.

Shortly after I took over, the company issued this statement: “Nadella and his team are tasked with leading Microsoft’s enterprise transformation into the cloud and providing the technology roadmap and vision for the future of business computing.” Steve had said the transformation would not happen overnight, but we were running out of time.

I had a very good idea about where we needed to go, but I realized that my real task was to motivate the pride and desire in the STB leaders to go there with me. Sure, I had a point of view, but I also recognized this was a team that cared deeply about enterprises, those customers with exacting and sophisticated computing needs. I wanted to build on their institutional knowledge and so I set out first to learn from the team I was to lead, and, hopefully, to earn the team’s respect. Only then could we go boldly together to a new and better place.

Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices. One thing I had learned from my dad’s experience as a senior Indian government official was that few tasks are more difficult than building a lasting institution. The choice of leading through consensus versus fiat is a false one. Any institution-building comes from having a clear vision and culture that works to motivate progress both top-down and bottom-up.

In business school I had read Young Men and Fire, a book by Norman Maclean (best known for A River Runs Through It). It tells the story of a tragic forest fire that killed thirteen “smokejumpers” (parachuting firefighters) in 1949 and the investigation that followed. What I remembered was the lesson that went unheeded: the urgent need to build shared context, trust, and credibility with your team. The lead firefighter, who ultimately escaped the blaze, knew that he had to build a small fire in order to escape the bigger fire. But no one would follow him. He had the skills to get his men out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective. His team paid the ultimate price.

I was determined not to make the same mistake.

Like that lead firefighter, I had to convince my team to adapt a counterintuitive strategy—to shift focus from the big server and tools business that paid everyone’s salary to the tiny cloud business with almost no revenue. To win their support, I needed to build shared context. I decided not to bring my old team from Bing with me. It was important that the transformation come from within, from the core. It’s the only way to make change sustainable.

The team I inherited was more like a group of individuals. The poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” but he’d feel otherwise had he joined our meetings. Each leader in the group was, in essence, CEO of a self-sustaining business. Each lived and operated in a silo, and most had been doing so for a very long time. My portfolio had no center of gravity, and to make matters worse, many thought they should have gotten my job. Their attitude was one of frustration—they were making all this money and now this little squeaky thing called the cloud came along and they didn’t want to bother with it.

To break out of this impasse, I met with everyone on the STB leadership team individually, taking their pulse, asking questions and listening. Together we had to see that our North Star would be a cloud-first strategy. Our products and technologies would optimize for the cloud, not just for private servers that resided on an organization’s own premises. Though we would be cloud-first, our server strength would enable us to differentiate ourselves as the company that delivered a hybrid solution to customers who wanted both private, on-premise servers and access to the public cloud.

This new framework helped reshape the argument, breaking down the resistance to going all-in on the cloud. I began to notice a new openness to innovation and a search for creative ways to meet the needs of our commercial customers.

Unfortunately, Red Dog, which had become Windows Azure, was still struggling. They were trying to leapfrog with a new approach to cloud computing, but the market was clearly giving them feedback that they first needed to meet their current needs. Mark Russinovich, who was an early member of the Red Dog team and the current CTO of Azure, had a clear road map in mind to evolve Azure. We needed to infuse more resources into the team to execute on that road map.

It was time to move Azure into the mainstream of STB rather than have it be a side project. People, the human element of any enterprise, are ultimately the greatest asset, and so I set about assembling the right team, starting with Scott Guthrie, a very accomplished Microsoft engineer. He had spearheaded a number of successful company technologies focused on developers. I tapped him to lead engineering for Azure on its way to becoming Microsoft’s cloud platform—our answer to Amazon Web Services.

Over time, many others from both inside and outside the company joined our effort. Jason Zander, another key leader who built .Net and Visual Studio, joined to lead the core Azure infrastructure. We recruited the highly regarded Big Data researcher Raghu Ramakrishnan from Yahoo and James Phillips who had cofounded the database company Couchbase. We relied heavily on the expertise of Joy Chik and Brad Anderson to advance our device management solutions for the mobile world. Under their leadership we made our first major steps in providing business customers the technology they need to secure and manage Windows, iOS, and Android devices. Julia Liuson took over our Visual Studio developer tools, evolving it to be the tool of choice for any developer regardless of platform or app.

Complementing these world-class engineers was world-class business planning and modeling. Takeshi Numoto moved from the Office team to join STB. Takeshi had been an important member of the team that had strategized and executed the transformation of Office products to a cloud-based, subscription model. And in his role as business lead for STB, he set about building the new commercial model that was based on creating meters to measure consumption of cloud services and inventing new ways to package our products for customers.

One of the early decisions I made was to differentiate Azure with our data and AI capabilities. Raghu and team designed and built the data platform that could help store and process exabyte-scale data. Microsoft was developing machine learning and AI capability as part of our products such as Bing, Xbox Kinect, and Skype Translator. I wanted us to make this capability available to third-party developers as part of Azure.

A key hire for Azure was Joseph Sirosh, who I recruited from Amazon. Joseph had been passionately working in ML for all his professional career, and he brought that passion to his new role at Microsoft. Now our cloud not only could store and compute massive amounts of data, it could also analyze and learn from the data.

The practical value of ML is immense and incredibly varied. Take a Microsoft customer like ThyssenKrupp, a manufacturer in the elevator and escalator business. Using Azure and Azure ML, they can now predict in advance when an elevator or escalator will need maintenance, virtually eliminating outages and creating new value for its customers. Similarly, an insurer like MetLife can spin up our cloud with ML overnight to run enormous actuarial tables and have answers to its most crucial financial questions in the morning, making it possible for the company to adapt quickly to dramatic shifts in the insurance landscape—an unexpected flu epidemic, a more-violent-than-normal hurricane season.

Whether you are in Ethiopia or Evanston, Ohio, or if you hold a doctorate in data science or not, everyone should have that capability to learn from the data. With Azure, Microsoft would democratize machine learning just as it had done with personal computing back in the 1980s.

To me, meeting with customers and learning from both their articulated and unarticulated needs is key to any product innovation agenda. In my meetings with customers I would usually bring other leaders and engineers along so that we could learn together. On one trip to the Bay Area, we met with several startups. It became clear that we needed to support the Linux operating system, and we had already taken some rudimentary steps toward that with Azure. But as Scott Guthrie and our team walked out of those meetings that day, it was certain that we needed to make first-class support for Linux in Azure. We made that decision by the time we got to the parking lot.

This may sound like a purely technical dilemma, but it also posed a profound cultural challenge. Dogma at Microsoft had long held that the open-source software from Linux was the enemy. We couldn’t afford to cling to that attitude any longer. We had to meet the customers where they were and, more importantly, we needed to ensure that we viewed our opportunity not through a rearview mirror, but with a more future-oriented perspective. We changed the name of the product from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure to make it clear that our cloud was not just about Windows.