When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, the company was seen as a declining giant that had lost mobile, dismissed the cloud, and turned its meetings into internal wars.
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Satya Nadella tells Microsoft's transformation from within: how an executive raised in India and nearly unknown succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, reorienting a stagnant company toward cloud and AI by changing its culture first. Personal memoir combines with a clear thesis: organizations, like software, need to hit refresh periodically or die of their own success.
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, the company was seen as a declining giant that had lost mobile, dismissed the cloud, and turned its meetings into internal wars. A decade later it was again the world's most valuable company. «Hit Refresh», written mid-transformation, documents the method: change the culture before the strategy. Nadella tells how he replaced the «know-it-all» culture with a «learn-it-all» one — drawing on Carol Dweck's growth mindset —, how his son Zain's illness taught him the empathy he later turned into a management principle, and how he bet the company on cloud and on deals with former enemies. The book has the genre's limitations — a sitting CEO doesn't recount the ugly battles — and its third part, on technology's future, has aged unevenly. But as a document on culture change in an organization of hundreds of thousands, told by the person who executed it, it has few equals.
For executives and readers interested in cultural transformation of large organizations; less useful for anyone seeking a complete Microsoft biography.
FactNadella published the book in 2017, only three years into his tenure; under his leadership Microsoft grew its market value more than tenfold and returned to being the most valuable company in the world.
