This speech is anything but clear from an engineering or analytical perspective.
"Outsized success" is always in relation to the value of the allocated resources. "Conventional success" is making slightly more than liquidating those resources and following a passive investment strategy, like index funds yielding 8% APR.
So what "Satya" is saying here is "I want higher risk, higher reward strategies", but "don't be unlucky" (don't "make a habit of" failure).
I'm no exec, but I'm my opinion, this is a poor strategy in the consumer and especially enterprise software and services space.
"Satya" is wrong: there are 3 knobs. The missing knob is risk allocation. This works in two ways: some areas are intrinsically risky, and some areas you choose to take risk in. Either way, you allocate that risk with strategy and resource allocation (the other two knobs). If an area can't fail, you may spend more resources to de-risk or hedge, or strategically avoid change or the area. If an area has outsized opportunity, the strategy and allocation takes more risk there.
"Satya" is telling the whole room that their area should favor high-risk, high reward strategy and allocation, when he should be telling them that they must determine if their area should favor or avoid risk to maximize the entire company's return on investment.
The real estate team should not be a risk center. It should not fire 90% of the janitors in favor of "AI first" robot vacuums. It should not decide that real estate as a service (WeWork) is a good strategy over buying real estate in advance of need. It should avoid capacity crunches while putting holdings in LLCs to reduce downside risk. It should vertically integrate the data centers (land, connectivity, power, water, regulation/politics/PR).
Lots of Microsoft failures look like risk misallocation to me. Windows phone was allocated risk too late in moving away from Windows CE. Windows Vista took too much risk and failed to release until features were rolled back. Windows 11 (financialization of the OS) seems like they are betting the farm to secure some ad and subscription revenue, and keep their low margin PC maker partners happy, while they make the platform the least attractive it's ever been.
In my mind, Satya is demanding outsized returns from the resources he’s allocated to them. He is delegating strategy to them. What we get and what Microsoft produces is a product of a dysfunctional organization without any coherent strategy. Slapping Copilot on existing products is not a strategy.
You make a good point I think the blog post still works.
"The real estate team should not be a risk center." - Why not? Sure, I agree with you it doesn't make a ton of sense _to me_ to fire 90% of the janitors.
Satya said he wants his team to be "Intellectually honest".
I'd argue that a plan to fire 90% of the janitors today is not that realistic, but if some real estate exec thinks they honestly have a plan that could be successful, are tracking data, and change their plan if they're wrong - what's the problem?
Maybe they're crazy enough to have figured something out we don't know....or not in which case Satya says you'll be gone if you make it a habit.
I find the word "success" a bit jarring. It sounds like "stock price" and not "great products", which is how I think about Microsoft and why Apple has gone past Microsoft (and why Apple is struggling now, having lost that focus on the product in at least software design).
I like it. There is something subtle here that marks Nadella as a pretty good senior manager (assuming the paraphrase is accurate). He explained what the job is and how to do it in a simple and concise way.
Now you'd think that would just be normal practice but I have witnessed a disturbing number of leaders who either never got this talk or lack the empathy to realise that you have to explain to people what they should be doing. I will single out "leaders" who demand people get vague (or even specific) results and they have to figure it out. That is the extent of the leader's communication. All too common a practice, that can work with the right people but it is bad management.
Nadella isn't doing that here. He is still asking for vague (or specific) results, but he is including a "with these tools and by doing these things" part that is quite important and makes the whole talk actionable.
Is this author a real person who was really a senior exec at Microsoft? If this piece isn't a parody, it's deeply revealing of what's going on in that company, but probably not in the way he intended.
> Once we were seated, he delivered the most concise, precise, and actionable lesson in leadership imaginable—a lesson I believe everyone could benefit from. As I recall, he said:
> > Congratulations …. your days of whining are over .
> > In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine.
> > Look, I’m not confused, I know you walk through fields of shit every day.
> > Your job is to find the rose petals.
> > Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need.
> > We’ve done our homework.
> > We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
> > That is what you have to work with.
> > Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.
> > And yes – you have a hard job.
Not concise: he could've said "Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Precise: what does he mean by "success"? Maximizing profit?
Actionable: yes. The rest of the lesson is "you control how resources are allocated within your team, and of course also the attitude and instructions you present to them. Set a goal for 'outsized' success (e.g. increase growth), have a plausible plan to that goal, follow the plan, and if the plan becomes no longer plausible have a new one. If you do that, you can occasionally fail and not be kicked out."
> Satya was not giving us a pep talk, he was giving us an architecture for success.
Maybe it was also an "architecture for success" but it was a pep talk. Also, this entire post sounds like typical AI, and like typical AI has lots of filler and vapidity. It would really benefit by having concrete examples of great leadership.
A teacher of mine once said that Shakespeare's greatest virtue was his economy of language. The maximization of meaning with the minimum of words. I thought this was ridiculous. How could such flowery prose be considered economical? Certainly the plot of his stories could be described more efficiently.
“You only have 2 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams; and 2) Resource allocation.”
But sir, that’s four controls.
“Four! You only have 4 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams; 2) Resource allocation. And a fanatical devotion to mandatory OneDrive storage!”
- - -
Jokes aside, I think the key to the piece is the hackneyed Navy Seals line: the speech describes little more than command-and-control, chain-of-command, classical militaristic mission assignment plus the scientific method. So there is a kernel of truth even if one disagrees with the cultural model and rejection of any hope for managing up.
The great Irony of showing a Google NotebookLLM generated infographic for this Microsoft pep talk..
(after how many billions MS is spending on Gen AI infra and Copilot)
Yup, Navy Seals and all that..
Seems like Satya may have over allocated his “success” there
Sure, they’re a successful organization but they’ve built their success on the backs of a ruthless layoff of thousands of they’re own loyal employees, and the transition of the American information economy to Indian offshore workers
“Outsized Success” should be replaced with long term success that our customers value.
For enterprise customers, that means security and stability which may mean a complete re-architecture of our software and our organization. For price conscious consumers, that doesn’t mean they don’t value security and stability; it just means they can’t pay for it. However it is important to support these customer in a non adversarial way. Warn them, yes, there is another zero day exploit that is trying to steal all your data and use your machine to mine shitcoin. Long term, we need to create a product development pipeline that will make customers beg us to take their money. Many of those ideas will never see daylight; but if we don’t have new products to sell we don’t have a company.
When I first came across this article I legitimately thought it was satire, I was expecting the author to go through some hazing à la soggy biscuit. But it's a serious article.. Oh my.
Anybody in that room has personally driven in excess of $100mm in value - maybe closer to $1b. You may not like what they deliver (I haven’t really used windows since windows 7 for instance) but beware the nerd trap of thinking your assessment of the product is what matters to a corporation ..
Is this a parody? It seems obviously made-up but the other comments seem to be taking it at face value?
> Re-read it again and again until you get it.
OK, now I get it.
"This is my room. This isn't your room. I'm the most important person here. You should be honoured to be standing in the same room as me. But you're not here to help make decisions. I already made the decisions. Good luck"
Right? "Go find outsized success, but I'm going to put a non negotiable cap on the size. You can pick a bad direction for good reasons, but only you will be responsible if there are no good directions."
To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.
Microsoft's revenue was $281.7 billion for the last year, up 15% on the previous year. Revenue from Azure was > $75 billion. Doesn't seem like a failing company to me.
Surely Azure is failing too, it's easily the worst cloud option. We have a few clients who run APIs on Azure and for all of them I've had to write special systems to monitor and handle the API falling over.
Azure is a failure once you factor in the concentration risk of their customer portfolio. Most of the revenue comes from maybe 10 companies. OpenAI alone is ~50% of future commitments.
avidiax|22 days ago
"Outsized success" is always in relation to the value of the allocated resources. "Conventional success" is making slightly more than liquidating those resources and following a passive investment strategy, like index funds yielding 8% APR.
So what "Satya" is saying here is "I want higher risk, higher reward strategies", but "don't be unlucky" (don't "make a habit of" failure).
I'm no exec, but I'm my opinion, this is a poor strategy in the consumer and especially enterprise software and services space.
"Satya" is wrong: there are 3 knobs. The missing knob is risk allocation. This works in two ways: some areas are intrinsically risky, and some areas you choose to take risk in. Either way, you allocate that risk with strategy and resource allocation (the other two knobs). If an area can't fail, you may spend more resources to de-risk or hedge, or strategically avoid change or the area. If an area has outsized opportunity, the strategy and allocation takes more risk there.
"Satya" is telling the whole room that their area should favor high-risk, high reward strategy and allocation, when he should be telling them that they must determine if their area should favor or avoid risk to maximize the entire company's return on investment.
The real estate team should not be a risk center. It should not fire 90% of the janitors in favor of "AI first" robot vacuums. It should not decide that real estate as a service (WeWork) is a good strategy over buying real estate in advance of need. It should avoid capacity crunches while putting holdings in LLCs to reduce downside risk. It should vertically integrate the data centers (land, connectivity, power, water, regulation/politics/PR).
Lots of Microsoft failures look like risk misallocation to me. Windows phone was allocated risk too late in moving away from Windows CE. Windows Vista took too much risk and failed to release until features were rolled back. Windows 11 (financialization of the OS) seems like they are betting the farm to secure some ad and subscription revenue, and keep their low margin PC maker partners happy, while they make the platform the least attractive it's ever been.
rawgabbit|22 days ago
cmp0|22 days ago
"The real estate team should not be a risk center." - Why not? Sure, I agree with you it doesn't make a ton of sense _to me_ to fire 90% of the janitors.
Satya said he wants his team to be "Intellectually honest".
I'd argue that a plan to fire 90% of the janitors today is not that realistic, but if some real estate exec thinks they honestly have a plan that could be successful, are tracking data, and change their plan if they're wrong - what's the problem?
Maybe they're crazy enough to have figured something out we don't know....or not in which case Satya says you'll be gone if you make it a habit.
boxed|22 days ago
roenxi|22 days ago
Now you'd think that would just be normal practice but I have witnessed a disturbing number of leaders who either never got this talk or lack the empathy to realise that you have to explain to people what they should be doing. I will single out "leaders" who demand people get vague (or even specific) results and they have to figure it out. That is the extent of the leader's communication. All too common a practice, that can work with the right people but it is bad management.
Nadella isn't doing that here. He is still asking for vague (or specific) results, but he is including a "with these tools and by doing these things" part that is quite important and makes the whole talk actionable.
ForHackernews|22 days ago
ileight2|22 days ago
chvid|22 days ago
armchairhacker|22 days ago
> > Congratulations …. your days of whining are over .
> > In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine.
> > Look, I’m not confused, I know you walk through fields of shit every day.
> > Your job is to find the rose petals.
> > Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need.
> > We’ve done our homework.
> > We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
> > That is what you have to work with.
> > Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.
> > And yes – you have a hard job.
Not concise: he could've said "Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Precise: what does he mean by "success"? Maximizing profit?
Actionable: yes. The rest of the lesson is "you control how resources are allocated within your team, and of course also the attitude and instructions you present to them. Set a goal for 'outsized' success (e.g. increase growth), have a plausible plan to that goal, follow the plan, and if the plan becomes no longer plausible have a new one. If you do that, you can occasionally fail and not be kicked out."
> Satya was not giving us a pep talk, he was giving us an architecture for success.
Maybe it was also an "architecture for success" but it was a pep talk. Also, this entire post sounds like typical AI, and like typical AI has lots of filler and vapidity. It would really benefit by having concrete examples of great leadership.
darkerside|22 days ago
What a moron.
croisillon|22 days ago
treetalker|22 days ago
But sir, that’s four controls.
“Four! You only have 4 controls: 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams; 2) Resource allocation. And a fanatical devotion to mandatory OneDrive storage!”
- - -
Jokes aside, I think the key to the piece is the hackneyed Navy Seals line: the speech describes little more than command-and-control, chain-of-command, classical militaristic mission assignment plus the scientific method. So there is a kernel of truth even if one disagrees with the cultural model and rejection of any hope for managing up.
AIorNot|22 days ago
Yup, Navy Seals and all that..
Seems like Satya may have over allocated his “success” there
Sure, they’re a successful organization but they’ve built their success on the backs of a ruthless layoff of thousands of they’re own loyal employees, and the transition of the American information economy to Indian offshore workers
cmp0|22 days ago
Microsoft (and anyone's) success is probably a function of strategy + execution + luck.
So I think it's hard to solely judge this philosophy by Microsoft's success or not.
He's basically saying: "You must take calculated, strategic risks. But don't be wrong too much."
What's a better strategy?
rawgabbit|22 days ago
For enterprise customers, that means security and stability which may mean a complete re-architecture of our software and our organization. For price conscious consumers, that doesn’t mean they don’t value security and stability; it just means they can’t pay for it. However it is important to support these customer in a non adversarial way. Warn them, yes, there is another zero day exploit that is trying to steal all your data and use your machine to mine shitcoin. Long term, we need to create a product development pipeline that will make customers beg us to take their money. Many of those ideas will never see daylight; but if we don’t have new products to sell we don’t have a company.
nneonneo|22 days ago
bjt|22 days ago
fzzzy|22 days ago
romanovcode|22 days ago
maximinus_thrax|22 days ago
kace91|22 days ago
Nope, this is the Super Bowl, period. I guess at those levels real life does not matter anymore, just _success_.
vessenes|22 days ago
irq-1|22 days ago
helloplanets|22 days ago
BoredPositron|22 days ago
jstanley|22 days ago
> Re-read it again and again until you get it.
OK, now I get it.
"This is my room. This isn't your room. I'm the most important person here. You should be honoured to be standing in the same room as me. But you're not here to help make decisions. I already made the decisions. Good luck"
ClaraForm|22 days ago
To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.
unknown|22 days ago
[deleted]
romanovcode|22 days ago
andyjohnson0|22 days ago
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
drcongo|22 days ago
bob1029|22 days ago
Azure is a failure once you factor in the concentration risk of their customer portfolio. Most of the revenue comes from maybe 10 companies. OpenAI alone is ~50% of future commitments.
lproven|22 days ago
mgaunard|22 days ago
tonyedgecombe|22 days ago
throwaway150|22 days ago
Nextgrid|22 days ago
the_real_cher|22 days ago
A bunch of corporate political types at a company that's too big to fail all acting important.
I'd listen to any entrepreneur over these guys.
_alaya|23 days ago
junon|22 days ago