I often sit down with Satya Nadella, my boss, and Microsoft’s third CEO—but rarely with microphones. In the final segment of our Microsoft CEO trilogy, we talk about his journey from his early days playing cricket to leading Microsoft, the link between poetry and programming, and how the company is leading the next wave of technological transformation—redefining how we build and interact with technology.
I often sit down with Satya Nadella, my boss, and Microsoft’s third CEO—but rarely with microphones. In the final segment of our Microsoft CEO trilogy, we talk about his journey from his early days playing cricket to leading Microsoft, the link between poetry and programming, and how the company is leading the next wave of technological transformation—redefining how we build and interact with technology.
Click here for the episode transcript
Satya Nadella: We sometimes shortchange human ambition, human agency's ability to deal with unbelievable new technology that comes along once every 10 years, once every 100 years, once every millennium, whatever. Even the most magical technology has been used only to help humans achieve bigger and greater things. How I educate myself, how I get information, how I conduct commerce, all of these things are going to be changed.
Brad Smith: That's Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO since 2014, and someone I've had the privilege of working for, for over a decade. As Microsoft celebrated its 50th anniversary, we sat down to discuss the path to becoming the company's third CEO, the surprising parallels between poetry and programming, and perhaps most important of all, the future of AI. My conversation with Satya Nadella, up next on Tools and Weapons.
Well, Satya, thank you. It's great to sit down. Of course, we sit down all the time, usually not with microphones in front of us. But this is part three of a trilogy, obviously, the conversation with Bill, with Steve, now with you. And I thought maybe we'd talk a little bit about your roots, as I did with Bill and Steve, and then really dive in to the Microsoft of today and your approach to being CEO. But let's start with where you began, growing up in India. I think one of your first passions was cricket, and I think that molded not just your approach to the sport, but a little bit to teamwork and the like. Tell us where that came from.
Satya Nadella: It's interesting, Brad, when I look back at it, I was quite honestly privileged in the sense that I had two parents who gave me the room, in some sense, to truly go and explore what I wanted to explore, whether it was the great Russian sort of literature or playing cricket in the dusty Deccan plateau. And I do think about team sports in general. I distinctly think about all the lessons I learned.
One of the things in particular that stands out for me is what leaders do to instill, in people they lead, confidence. In fact, I was having a very ordinary day in the field, and there was this guy who was my school captain, who then sort of changes me over and then takes a wicket and then gives me the ball back to bowl, and then I go on to have perhaps my best ever performance. And so I asked him afterwards as to why did he do that? And he looks at me and he says, "Because I need you for the season, not just for the match. I didn't want to break your confidence." And I'm thinking, God, this is a high school captain-
Brad Smith: Interesting.
Satya Nadella: ... with that level of enlightened leadership skills. And so that's always stood out for me. And so there's lots of things that all of us who grew up playing any sport learn in school that I think come back to us in different forms as we go on to our professional lives. But sport has been a major, major part, it was a major part of me growing up and I still think about it.
Brad Smith: Well, I think you were exposed to so many interesting things growing up, and one obviously was sports, but another was I think your dad gave you a computer.
Satya Nadella: That's right.
Brad Smith: When did that happen?
Satya Nadella: Yeah, so my dad luckily had a chance to work in one of the UN organizations. And so he was an Indian civil servant. And so when he was working in the UN, somehow he had both the monetary capacity and the access to a Sinclair Z80. And the thing I remember is, it's the first piece of, I don't know, technology, tool, whatever, that I've ever used that I felt reacted to what I wanted to get done. It is the most malleable material. I mean, these are words that I picked up later, but it is fascinating. And it had an impression, but I was not one of those people who said, "Oh my God, that means computer science is my calling and high-tech is my calling." I was still more interested in cricket and doing the things I wanted to do at that time. But it stuck somehow that this is a tool that can change the world. And that I think is what later on formed into more of a real thesis for me.
Brad Smith: The other thing I think is interesting is, obviously when you had a computer and you started to code, you were able to, as you say, take words, make them malleable, and get the computer to respond. But you also developed a real love of poetry as well, growing up, another exercise in using words. Did that come from your mother?
Satya Nadella: Yeah, so my mom was a professor of Sanskrit, and she had this very cool phrase in Sanskrit where it sort of translated in English, she said, "If you're a child of a scholar, you are an idiot." And so she would always say this to me and say, "God, I wish you knew little more of literature or enjoyed literature." And she was a professor of Sanskrit drama. And so she had a very aesthetic sense of what beauty is. And so she was the one who introduced in me... And in fact, my dad and my mother would talk about Sanskrit drama. My father also had deep interest. He was an economist, but he had deep interest. And late in the night I would see them talking about some stuff about Sanskrit drama and what it meant and what are those lines, and what have you. And so even growing up I thought, why are they talking about stuff that is not even a living language?
Brad Smith: Interesting.
Satya Nadella: And I had sort of slightly disdain, because one, I was not good at it. But I must say it had a lasting impression because in some sense, as you learn to code, you realize coding is another form of compression. And poetry is also compression, which is, you are able to take pretty long forms of content and compress it into two lines of poetry that captures the essence of it. That's what even code does. And so, yes, poetry is another thing. I'm not good at it. I think I'm given more credit for my love for poetry than I really deserve. So I got inspired around poetry, and how poetry can be perhaps a great way to sort of understand the world and express how you feel, just like code does.
Brad Smith: I want to fast-forward all the way to 2013. Steve Ballmer decides to step down. People were asked if they wanted to raise their hand and apply to become Microsoft CEO. You were not one of the first to raise your hand. Tell us about the thought process.
Satya Nadella: Yeah, the first thing I'd say, Brad, it's kind of fascinating when we look back at it. At 2013, when Steve sort of said, "Oh, I'm going to retire," it's not like... I didn't grow up in a Microsoft where, at least I don't think most of us didn't have it, I clearly didn't have a concept call there is going to be a Microsoft after Bill and Steve.
Brad Smith: Right.
Satya Nadella: It is not an I thought, right? I sort of like, "These guys are here and they're going to be here forever and I'll work for you forever." That was the concept I had. So in 2013, it was a bit of a game-changer when, oh wow, Steve's going to retire. And it was quite frankly unclear as to exactly what happens next. And it was not even... I remember, I think it was August of 2013 was when-
Brad Smith: Yeah, it was.
Satya Nadella: ... decided, and then I didn't even know that you needed to raise your hand or there was going to be a process. It was not even a thing that I had thought of, although there's a board and the board now has to go through a process of getting the next CEO. And I had just taken, two years prior, a new job which I was fully occupied with. And that's the one thing I remember, in '92 joining the company and feeling like, wow, this is the best job, and if I retired doing that job, that'd be fantastic. It is not like I was looking for anything else. And then the rest of all of what I did at Microsoft was, I felt like, yeah, this is the job I want to be doing. And so it is not like I'm waiting. I always say this. I was never waiting for my next job to do my work.
Brad Smith: Right. Just as growing up, you wove together different themes, different aspects of what became important to you in life, let me start with the thing that I think people thought of you first. Culture. You talked about the importance of it. Remind us a little bit of what brought you to this focus on culture, and why, even that first week as CEO, you made that a big part of what you asked the senior leaders at the company to think about.
Satya Nadella: Yeah, I mean, there are two things I really think, Brad, I came to very quickly, and it sort of came naturally, was mission and culture. And the reason I came at it, because I felt that as the first non-founder... I mean, technically Steve is not founder, but man, he had founder status in the company. And so to me, if you're going to step into the shoes of two unbelievably legendary CEOs, then you better sort of start with rearticulating the two things that I felt mattered, which is, what's that sense of purpose for the company? And so that was one pillar. And then the other pillar was this culture pillar. And to me, the culture pillar was important because in tech business, technologies will come and go. Platform shifts will happen.
You need to reinterpret your mission with a changing landscape, and that can only be done if you have a culture that allows you to reinterpret, right? Because if you feel like, "I don't need, it's scripture from [inaudible 00:10:30] I'm never going to have to reinterpret it," then that's going to be tough because you needed a learning culture. And so that's why we were lucky enough that I had a chance, thanks to Anu, my wife, who introduced me to this Carol Dweck's work around growth mindset, more in the context of our children's growth and what have you. And it stuck with me, right? I'd read it I think in 2012 or 2011. And so that always was like, wow. And I said, "Maybe let's bring this on the company, and say this growth mindset as a cultural sort of meme can be a great handle to talk about learning culture." And so that was why I thought it was important for us to talk about mission culture.
Brad Smith: And you grounded everyone. I mean, it really did, I think, unite the senior leadership team and unified the employee base. And it's sort of a classic of what people think about as sort of more soft skills, but you didn't shy away from making hard decisions. If we go back to 2014, by the late spring, early summer, there was this project that had just almost this nondescript label, Project Violet, but one of the first things you did was say, "We're going to have to restructure some. We're going to have to cut some things. We're going to even have to eliminate some jobs so we can invest in the things that will be fundamental to the company's future." How did you build the support for that?
Satya Nadella: Yeah, I mean, the main challenge in that timeframe we faced, we were quite honestly behind on two fronts. We knew that the world was going to be shaped by both the mobile transformation and the cloud transformation, and we were in both, and we were weak in both. And so we needed to kind of decide, what is it that we are going to go concentrate and win? Then if we had a clear path to winning in both, then that would be wonderful. If not, we had to make some choices. And so that was what led to that Project Violet and about saying, okay, we have a real shot. I always say that, if somebody had to give me, hey, pick one, cloud or mobile, I would always pick cloud because I know that the cloud will outlast any one device as an endpoint. And it was going to be the control plane for what is going to be all experiences going forward.
And so that was the intuition. And this is not a thing that just dawned on me on one day. It is something that I sort of learned throughout my Microsoft career that was in fact very much part of even my CEO interview as to what was my worldview. And so it was sort of like I had a deep sense of, okay, what's the direction for the company? Given our structural position, given where technology is going, what's the winning hand? And in there we had to make some tough choices.
Brad Smith: And there were a couple of new bets that you started to place, building on Steve Ballmer's advice, "Be bold, but be right." One of the first that I think surprised people was saying, "We're going to bring Office to the iPad."
Satya Nadella: It was an important moment for us because the Microsoft I grew up in... In fact, I was talking to Bill even the other day, when, after all, Office was born on the Mac first, before even Windows happened. And so it's not that alien to Microsoft's culture or history, which is, we conceived, as Bill says, it's a software factory, and his idea was, "Hey, I'm just going to build lots of software for all platforms and that's what we are." And so it was not that hard for us to say, "Okay, let us make sure that the Office franchise is vibrant on any new form factor in which it can be used effectively." And iPad definitely was one of those things, and so I'm glad we did it. But it was I think a decision that helped, to your point, communicate more internally and externally our strategy than a real big decision that I made, quite frankly. It was, I think, a great communication tool.
Brad Smith: One of the things you've been talking a lot about is the evolution of work, whether it's writing software or being an organization with a manager or being a manager. We're migrating to a world where people are going to get more help from AI itself, not just as co-pilots, but agents, this agentic world, and we need to embrace that ourselves as a company. What do you see as the biggest challenges in persuading people who create code for a living to rely on code in these new ways?
Satya Nadella: Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. In fact, one of the first products that even for me helped, I'd say, solidify why this phase of AI is going to be a real platform shift was GitHub Copilot. It started with this Codex model in its early form with just code completions. I mean, software engineers are pretty skeptical people, like all engineers are, and no one thought that this thing would work and be any good. And it started working. And the interesting thing is, it went from being a joke to being standard issue in months. And now of course we've now gone all the way to even Copilot with agents and Copilot with autonomous agents. It's just unbelievable.
You can't think of software development without AI being part of it. It's kind of like I say, I would never be employable at Microsoft but for the red squiggly word because I can't spell. And so it's kind of becoming like that, when it comes to software tools. But the interesting point you make though is, I go back to our mission of empowering every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. I think that's what AI is about. I think that people have different notions of AI, but my fundamental view still is, even with all of the advances, not taking away from it, it's still a tool. I fundamentally believe that we sometimes shortchange human ambition, human agency's ability to deal with unbelievable new technology that comes along once every 10 years, once every 100 years, once every millennium, whatever. Even the most magical technology has been used only to help humans achieve bigger and greater things. In that context, if you go even narrow, I think we conflate sometimes what is knowledge work with knowledge worker.
So for example, if somebody had said in whatever, early 1980s, "Everybody in the world is going to be typing," people would have thought it's crazy. Hey, we have a typist pool. Why the heck does everybody need to type? But guess what? That's what PCs did, and phones have taken that to the next level, where if somebody came from Mars and saw what I'm doing, they would say, "Oh, what? This guy is a typist," because that's all I do. And so to me, that is what is going to be the transformation with AI, which is, we are going to go to the next level of abstraction where what I want done... Like when I use Researcher every day, preparing for meetings, you and I had this chance, right?
Brad Smith: Right.
Satya Nadella: It's magical. It's like having the smartest analyst that is there with you 24/7, that you can ask the hardest questions and they come back having thought about it, quite frankly, not just an instant thing, with some great reports, which sometimes will have some mistakes, which will give you better insight. That ability to sort of work with your AI agents, to be more prepared, have more sense of accomplishment and more agency in your job, that's the future of knowledge work. In fact, I kind of described to... Bill and I talk a lot about this, which is, one of my favorite tools is Excel, right? When I first had the ability to say, "God, I can think of numbers in rows and columns," it was a mind-blowing way to change things. And that's the way I think. It's like when PowerPoint, Word, Excel all became standard tools everybody could use to create information, express themselves, share information. I think AI is going to be the next big 10Xer on that.
Brad Smith: I do think you're so right. I mean, I found even just frankly preparing for this, once it becomes part of your life, I was using Researcher this morning on three or four different projects, you suddenly step back from time to time and say, "What did I do before this?" I think there were just more questions that went unanswered every day.
Satya Nadella: Absolutely.
Brad Smith: But we still are at a point where the percentage of the world's people even who are connected to the internet, who are experiencing this, it's a minority compared to the percentage of people, the billions of people who will now need to experience this as we go forward. How do we reach the world?
Satya Nadella: Yeah. It's a great question, and I know both of us are big fans of Jeffrey Ding and his sort of theory of diffusion and what have you. Because that's what I fundamentally believe, right? Thanks to sort of the rails that exist, whether it's the mobile phone or the cloud infrastructure, it is possible... Because one of the other demos for me, Brad, but shaped at least my worldview, was watching a rural Indian farmer use a WhatsApp bot, that was built on top of GPT-3.5 by an Indian developer, which translated that farmer's local language and need for access to some subsidy program and give that farmer real agency to be able to do things using that phone and that bot and that AI, that was built in the west coast of the United States. And it was mind-blowing to me, sort of the rate at which things were diffusing, and also what it meant that it was meeting the needs of someone where they are at versus expecting them to do multiple things before they can even use it.
And so if you say that's what's possible, then I think the key thing is to think about diffusion broadly. That means skilling broadly, right? It's not just about technology being accessible. Getting people to be equipped to be able to use the technology with whatever skills they need. One skill could be just get over the fear of using something. And that's where learning by doing is perhaps one of the most important things that we can do, is to get broad issuance of all of this technology around the world, get people to use it, then have the agency to change their work, their work artifacts and workflow. How I educate myself, how I get information, how I conduct commerce, all of these things are going to be changed.
For us it's never, never about celebrating tech for tech's sake. It's about celebrating what we can do with technology to create magical experiences that make a real difference in our countries, in our companies, in our communities.
Brad Smith: Maybe that's a good place to bring this conversation to a close because it almost brings us back full circle. Your life growing up was about these different themes, these different disciplines, ways of thinking that you wove together. That's been a part of Microsoft since the company was founded. It's been such an important part of your part of this trilogy, the three CEOs. Let me take you back to poetry. As we look to the future, as we think about AI as this new tool, is there any inspiration that you draw from say one of your favorite poems that frames
Satya Nadella: Yeah, because I've been thinking about it a lot because, in the context of our sort of 50th year and this sense of a new beginning, if you will, with this AI age and even this conversation around, what does it mean to build for the future? I think that the two lines that are the best lines for anybody who ever wants to build anything is from Rilke, where he talks about letting the future enter us and changing itself in us before it becomes real. That's the most beautiful lines of poetry that capture I think the essence of what anybody who's a builder wants to achieve.
Brad Smith: Well, and I think there's something poetic, if I may say, about that because I think it keeps us grounded, it keeps us broad-minded, and I think it gives us inspiration to build things that are truly great tools for people. So, thank you. Thanks for the conversation.
Satya Nadella: Thank you so much, Brad. It was such a pleasure.
Brad Smith: Yeah. Look forward to what comes next.
Satya Nadella: That's right. Thank you.