38 REAL-LEADERS.COM / WINTER 2022 COVER STORY effectively. You Are a Product of Those Who Came Before Nadella cites his parents as having the most significant influence on him. He explained how the mismatched personalities of his parents helped build his unique world-view during a discussion at Stanford School of Business in 2019. “My father was an economist, leftist Marxist, andmy mother was a Sanskrit drama professor. They could hardly agree on anything, giving me room to formmy own opinions. The way my father combined his work with his life's passions, the deep meaning he derived from it, has been instrumental in shaping my views of work and life," says Nadella. His father told him that life is a terminal condition, and no one makes it out alive, but that one's life can speak to others by passing on what is most important about being human and how to live. “The world is confronting massive and compounding challenges,” Nadella explained to the Stanford audience. “Our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more has never beenmore urgent or needed. To realize this mission, we must ensure the technology we create benefits everyone on the planet and the planet itself by focusing on four interconnected pillars: Support inclusive economic opportunity, protect fundamental rights, create a sustainable future, and earn trust. As we share our progress in these areas, it reminds us that we are only as good as our commitment to keep learning, adapting, and empowering others to act. To drive real, structural change in the world, we must make a sustained commitment — together.” Succession: How to Fill Those Big Shoes “The best advice I got from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates when I came onboard as CEOwas not to try and be like them. Their clear message was that I shouldn’t bother giving the impression that I was succeeding these two people, but rather create my own identity,” Nadella explained to Bloomberg's David Rubenstein in 2017. “I remember in the interview process conducted by the board, I was asked, ‘Do you want to be the CEO?’ I answered, ‘Only if you want me to be the CEO.’ The feedback I got was that ‘People who want to be CEO say they really want to become CEO.’ I said, ‘But that’s not me.’”When Nadella spoke with Ballmer a short while later, he was told, “Just be yourself; it’s too late to be different.”When you take over a multi-billion-dollar company such as Microsoft, it can be challenging to say to two industry greats such as Gates and Ballmer that you no longer like what they did and that you’d like to change things. “I was a consummate insider at Microsoft for 25 years,” Nadella explained to Rubenstein. “Growing up in the company under Bill and Steve allowedme to see what they got wrong and right. I already had a point of view on what I wanted to do if I became CEO. It wasn’t about trying to criticize the past, but more about what we needed to do for the future.” Ironically, one of the first things Nadella did when he became CEOwas to ask founder Microsoft's platforms and tools are enabling people and organizations to achieve remarkable things that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. =Microsoft has used cybersecurity to defend Ukraine from Russian attacks. Russia started targeting the digital infrastructure of Ukraine’s telecom companies, energy grids, and government networks a year before the invasion. “Evacuating” critical data from Ukrainian facilities to the cloud helped protect this data. =NASA’s Mars mission achieved a milestone in space exploration when the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity completed the first powered flight on another planet. This feat would not have been possible without 12,000 developers on GitHub who contributed code to the open-source software that powered the flight. =When a 1,300-foot ship blocked the Suez Canal last year and disrupted global shipping, Microsoft partner Blue Yonder used Microsoft AI technologies to help its customers. Alternate sources were found for more than $500 million worth of products and parts affected by the delay. =Team Rubicon — a nonprofit organization that responds to humanitarian crises worldwide — set up 169 COVID-19 response sites across the United States in just 30 days. The team used Dynamics 365 to manage the deployment of thousands of volunteers. =Surgeons at Mt. Sinai Health System in New York and Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Uganda have together performed more than 500 surgeries using mixed-reality technology. The system enables doctors in New York to provide annotated recommendations that appear in the field of vision of their Ugandan colleagues — even though they are thousands of miles apart.
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