Satya Nadella has just been named as the third chairman in Microsoft’s history
-- an outcome of his instrumental role in growing Microsoft to a trillion-dollar firm. Here’s how he turned the company around-
In 2014, Microsoft was in the midst of a crisis. Its growth rate had dropped dramatically and its share price wasn’t budging. That’s when Satya Nadella took over as the new CEO and called for a major overhaul.
So what changed with Nadella at the helm? Well, for starters, Nadella pulled the plug on the Windows operating system as its core product. He brought Microsoft’s software and services like Office 365 to other operating systems like iOS, Android and “open source” Linux.
But his masterstroke was to put Microsoft’s cloud-computing arm, Azure, in the spotlight to the extent that it is now the second biggest cloud-computing platform globally, behind Amazon Web Services.
The company didn’t stop there, it began forming partnerships with major rivals like Amazon, Dropbox, Red Hat, and Salesforce for software services. Additionally, it owes its success to acquisitions like LinkedIn (professional social network) and GitHub (software code repository).
So much for the company, but Nadella wanted to do something for the employees as well. He brought about a cultural renaissance within the company adopting a culture of collaboration and active role modelling.
He introduced the concept of growth mindset and preached employees to transform from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls.
The result has been double-digit revenue growth and a market capitalisation from $380 billion in 2014 to $1.9 trillion at present.
Quite a stunning turnaround, isn’t it?