Microsoft's new CEO, Barnard's exclusive interview: Want to live a long life must be self-improvement

Microsoft's new CEO, Nadra (Tencent Technology map), recently interviewed Microsoft's new chief executive, Satia Nadra Satya Nadella, about how he would lead the software giant and how he and Bill Gates (bill Gates talks about how to work together and how to reshape culture. The following is an overview of the interview: Q: What lessons have you learned about leadership from Ballmer, Microsoft's former CEO, Steve Ballmer? A: The most important thing I learned from Ballmer happened two or three years ago. When I was sitting with him, I remember asking him a question: how do you feel about my performance? Then he said, "You will know the answer to this question, and I will know, and everyone will know." So you don't have to ask me: How did I do? At your level, everything will be pretty subtle. I continued: How should I compare myself to the people who had been in my post before? "Who cares?" said Ballmer. The environment will change. In my opinion, the only thing that matters is what you do with the cards you have available at hand. I hope you can focus on this instead of trying to do something about it. The lesson I learned is that you have to work on your feet and have a fairly honest understanding of where you are. Q: What have you learned from gates? A: Gates has the most rigorous personality, and he's always prepared to find some kind of logic flaw in the first five minutes of a meeting. I would like to know why I spend so much energy, but I do not see any flaws at all? At first, I often said to myself, "he scares me." But in fact he is very good, because you can refute him. He would argue with you for a few minutes and then say, "Oh, you're right." Both Gates and Ballmer have this trait. They will test you with stress and test whether you are sure of your point of view. Q: People are curious about how gates will work with you. A: The outside world will say: "Look, this is a new thing." But in fact, we have been cooperating for nine years now. So I don't feel anything wrong with this arrangement, and I hope he can really make time to manage Microsoft. He was actually making some pretty tough trade-offs and said, "Well, I'm going to put more energy into this." Most intriguing of all, it is a gift that only gates can make everyone energetic enough to show their best performance within Microsoft. Q: What lessons have you learned in your teens about leadership skills? A: I played cricket on the school team and there was a very shocking incident. I was a pitcher, and one day my pitching was very general. Then the captain took my place, made the whole team a breakthrough, and then let me go up and throw the ball. I never asked him why he did that, but my impression was that if he didn't let me go back to my place, it would destroy my confidence. It was a delicate, heavyLeadership lessons, let me know when to intervene, and when to build confidence in the team. I think what a leader has to do in the first place is likely to be: to enhance the overall confidence of the team you are leading. Q: Tell me about the management methods you will use in this new position. A: What I am most concerned about now is how I can maximize the efficiency of the leadership team and what I can do to nurture this efficiency. A lot of people on the team were with me, and I used to work for some of them. What I want to do is to get people really involved in the work and let us feel the energy as a whole team. I will not evaluate it by the individual words they say. If they don't have a great talent, they won't get into the team. I will only evaluate the whole team. Do we have the ability to communicate really, and do we have the ability to do things that are good for the whole organization based on everyone's talents? That's what I care about. Q: Microsoft has acknowledged the need to create a unified Microsoft culture to a greater extent. How would you do that? A: One of the things we've been talking about so much about is what is the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we have introduced is based on an idea that the goal of the leadership team is to bring clarity, alliance, and strength. In other words, what do we want to accomplish? Are we together to accomplish this task? What kind of goal do we want to pursue with that intensity? That's what I really need to do. Culturally, I think we've always felt that we've found the right formula and all we have to do is try to optimize the formula. But it's time to find a new formula. So the question now is: how can we capture the intellectual capital of 130,000 of people and make some real innovations? Any organizational structure that we already have is not important because competition or innovation is never confined to those rules. So how do you create the ability to organize yourself to innovate and stay focused? The High-tech industry is probably one of the hardest to do this because something seems certain to fail, but the end result is the opposite. So you have to be able to perceive those early signs of success, and the leader has to be really involved in it and not let the idea of innovation die in the womb. When you run an annual revenue of up to 70 billion dollars, the 1 million dollar project will make you feel insignificant, but this 1 million dollar project may be the most important project. For me, that is likely to represent a major cultural change-perceiving the concept of innovation and then nurturing it to grow. Innovation does not come from an organizational chart or an organizational boundary. Most people attach great importance to organizational ownership, but I think people must have an innovative agenda. Q: How do you hire people? What questions will be asked? A: I Will360 degrees of investigation. I will ask candidates to tell me how their managers evaluate them, how they evaluate them at the same time, how their direct reports evaluate them, and in some cases how their clients or partners evaluate them. I think that these problems will be woven into a big net, so that I can better understand the candidate's self-awareness. I also ask: what is your most proud thing? Tell me when you set a certain standard, and then when you look back, you say, wow, is that really what I do, how do you feel? And then I'm going to ask, what's the most regrettable thing about you, and how do you feel about yourself when you don't get the job done best? These two sets of questions helped me find a lot of talent. Basically, I think if you're not self-conscious, you're not going to learn, and if you don't learn, you can't do useful things in the future. Q: What would you do if someone said something to you in a meeting that was as uncomfortable as a fingernail across a blackboard? A: One of the things that makes me crazy is that someone walks into the boardroom and says, "That's what we used to do." Or, someone had a moment, and then said, "That's what we're doing now." Both of these ideas are very dangerous pitfalls. The question is: how can you learn from those valuable experiences and then apply them to your current environment to improve your standards? Q: Do you have any major ideas on how to do well in your new job and how you want to leave your mark? A: In our industry, we need to reinvent ourselves or create the future if we want to live longer. As far as Microsoft is concerned, we have been successful in the past 39 years, and the problem now is more about how to reinvent itself. We have had great success, but the future has nothing to do with the success of the past, but with whether we can invent something new to really advance our future growth. The ups and downs of everything is one of the things that fascinates me, from civilization to family to company. We all know that even companies with a history of centuries are rare. For us, to be a century-old company, to get people to find work in this company, that's what we're after.