Publisher's note: This article is adapted from the spring 2014 spring issue Chicago Booth Magazine. Read it in its entirety here.
In 1992, at the same time, he was accepted at Business School of the University of ChicagoSatya Nadella received her first Microsoft job offer. Nadella did not want to pass one or the other opportunity, so he postponed his admission, then registered in the MBA program of the Booth weekend. This meant to fly for Chicago on Friday evening, take lessons on Saturdays and return to Seattle for the work week, a process he repeated for two and a half years during the realization of his MBA.
Nadella, 46, attributes to her Uchicago studies by completing his engineering history, giving him the knowledge and confidence necessary to tackle complex questions at the intersection of business and technology. Booth teaches that “any strategy can be summed up for a simple microeconomic analysis,” said Nadella in an interview in June 2013.
After 22 years with Microsoft, Nadella, Mba'97, was promoted to CEO of the company on February 4, becoming only the third person in the history of Microsoft to hold this title.
He took the bar at a time when technological competitors have Microsoft in their reticle. Similar leadership changes took place at Apple Inc., where CEO Tim Cook is trying to respect the heritage of the late Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, young CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook Inc. moved the technological border to social networks.
During her four months at the head of Microsoft, Nadella was credited with having started her change in business with a “New perspectives and a more respectful attitude. “”
Nadella “brings a more entrepreneurial and more start-up strategy to Microsoft”, said Sunil Kumar, dean of Chicago Booth, In a recent interview with Forbes. “But he continues to talk about playing the long game too.”
Manufacturing a CEO
The skills that Nadella needed to assess new commercial opportunities to Microsoft was perfected in a standing finance course taught by Steven Kaplan, the distinguished professor of the Neubauer family and finance family. In a conversation of November 2013 with Stand studentsNadella said the class was one of the two most important courses he followed in Booth, with Professor Emeritus Marvin's leadership.
Nadella was a student in the first class of entrepreneurial financing Kaplan taught, in the spring of 1996. The class is considered a cornerstone in which students use case studies to assess what makes a good investment for a startup or for an established company. “You really have to set up a lot of things: strategy, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,” Kaplan said in an interview.
Nadella excelled in this holistic thought, remembers Kaplan. “He can take a situation and analyze and articulate the problems involved. It is a useful skill in a CEO. It can both write well and understand the case quantitatively. According to my experience, the people who have this skills are successful. ”
At Microsoft, Nadella sails in a quickly changing technological landscape, in which customers have moved away from traditional desktop computers, to nidite mobile platforms such as tablets and smartphones.
Nadella made a decisive first step at the end of March with the announcement at her first press conference that Microsoft would publish iPad versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This is a spectacular departure for the company whose software had been designed to run on its Windows operating system. Nadella described a neutral vision of the platform he called “a critical intersection of the mobile and the cloud”.
“You can measure if you do something useful,” Nadella told students in November. “Do you feel a little stretched? Otherwise, there is something that is wrong.”
“A great designer and a psychologist”
Born in Hyderabad, India, Nadella started at Microsoft by building the operating system that has become Windows NT. Since then, he has helped manage software products for small and medium -sized enterprises. For a while, he had a technical supervision of Bing, Microsoft's search engine. He was in charge of engineering for the company's advertising systems, as well as the MSN company information portal, and he managed the Microsoft Cloud servers and platform.
More recently, as executive vice-president of Cloud and Microsoft companies, Nadella took advantage of the trend towards Cloud-based IT, which uses a network of remote servers on the Internet to store and process data.
During the November conversation with the students, he spoke of four major trends in the technology he sees evolving simultaneously – Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and Social Media – with the megadata being the greatest potential opportunity. Microsoft Halo 4's XBOX video game, Nadella, said: “is the most focused on the planet application.”
In conversations, he highlights interdisciplinary connections. “It is a real rebirth time in terms of what it takes to create successful products,” Nadella told students. “You must have the sensitivity of both a great designer and a psychologist.”
With its natural enthusiasm and its desire to learn from others, the new CEO constantly demonstrates a spirit to work. He jokes about the purchase of more books that he cannot read and register for more online courses that he cannot finish. Although the technical jargon fluent, it is also devoted to poetry.
In his email to Microsoft employees on the first day of CEO, he paraphrased the advice of an improbable source: Oscar Wilde. Nadella wrote: “We must believe the impossible and delete the improbable.”
