What does a CEO get to do?’ he [Nadella] asked in 2016. ‘You’ve got to pass judgment on an uncertain future and curate culture. For both, I feel, I learn a lot from these trips.
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I’d leave my PA, Shenaaz Aliverdi, behind, take a notebook with me and ask questions like: what would you do differently if you were me? What is it that management is doing right and should do more of? Participants had to answer both questions - they couldn’t be passive. You’d be amazed at the insights one gets about business from these two questions.
Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
There is something only a CEO uniquely can do, which is set that tone, which can then capture the soul of the collective. And its culture.’ - Satya Nadella
I went to our board’s compensation committee and explained the dilemma. When you innovate, everything needs to change, not just the way you make or deliver a product. Many of the practices and structures within the company need to adapt, too, including, in this case, how the board rewards our executives. I proposed a radical idea— essentially, that I would determine compensation, based on how much they contributed to this new strategy, even though, without easily measured financial results, this was going to be far more subjective than our typical compensation practices.
What would Obama do?’ we took to asking each other in moments when his heart flagged. How do you handle yourself on the way out, regardless of whether you were given the respect you deserved?