Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, applies Buddha's empathy principle to Life and Business
SINCE SATYA NADELLA BECAME CEO IN 2014, MICROSOFT HAS GAINED $1.8 TRILLION IN MARKET VALUE
This article, first published July 27, 2021, is being re-published since Global Indian Times has also begun posting on Substack.
https://www.globalindiantimes.com/globalindiantimes/2021/7/27/microsoft-satya-nadella
July 27, 2021
The global pandemic lockdown did not impact Microsoft’s business. Its revenues rose 18% to $168 billion, in the fiscal year that ended June 2021. Operating profits rose 32% to $70 billion, the Redmond, Washington based company announced today. It has a stock market value of $2.2 trillion.
Microsoft’s products and services include Windows operating software – there are more than 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10; Word, Excel and Power Point in its Office software; Xbox video gaming platform, with more than 100 million users; Surface tablet computers; cloud servers and services with systems that every day analyze 6.5 trillion digital signals to identify emerging threats and protect customers; and LinkedIn, the networking platform used by 774 million, primarily by professionals and office workers, in more than 200 countries.
“Our results show that when we execute well and meet customers’ needs in differentiated ways in large and growing markets, we generate growth, as we’ve seen in our commercial cloud – and in new franchises we’ve built, including gaming, security, and LinkedIn, all of which surpassed $10 billion in annual revenue over the past three years,” Satya Nadella, chief executive officer and chairman said in the company’s earnings statement.
Nadella, 53 years old, took over as CEO in February 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock has risen more than six-fold, gaining an estimated $1.8 trillion in market value.
In fiscal 2020, Nadella received $44 million in salary, equity and other compensation. His stock ownership in the company is worth $570 million. He was appointed chairman of the board in June this year.
Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992, most recently served as head of its cloud infrastructure and services group. Under him, the cloud business outperformed the market and took shares from Amazon, Google, Oracle and other rivals.
Previously, Nadella led research and development for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Sun Microsystems.
Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Nadella’s early ambition was to be a professional cricketer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, affiliated with Mangalore University, India; a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee; and an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1996.
Nadella serves on the board of trustees to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Chicago. He is also on the board of Starbucks.
He is married to Anupama, an architect. They have three children and live in Bellevue, Washington. Nadella and Anu’s fathers were both in the Indian Administrative Service, the most senior rank of officers in the central government.
In 2020, in a LinkedIn post paying homage to his father who passed away, Nadella wrote that perhaps the most enduring of his father’s “life lessons was the need to keep an open mind and to keep curiosity alive throughout one’s life…His overall life’s pursuit was clear: working as a public servant creating systems that could deliver on universal rights (food, housing, health, education, employment) in spite of India’s complexity, constraints, and scale. To meet these ends, he was comfortable borrowing from both Marx and Hayek.”
Nadella’s 2017 book, “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone,” was a New York Times bestseller.
In the book, he discusses individual change, the transformation at Microsoft and “the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing.”
He also writes about a personal challenge. Dealing with oldest child Zain’s severe cerebral palsy led him to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Buddha, writes Nadella, did not set out to found a world religion. Buddha sought to find out why we suffer.
“I learned (from Buddha) that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.”
Nadella posts regularly on LinkedIn, where he has over nine million followers. In one post, he says he wrote the book hoping it “inspires people to discover more empathy in their own lives.” In addition to impacting individuals, he sees empathy as “a quality that shapes our mission of empowerment at Microsoft and our quest to meet unmet and unarticulated needs of customers…(Empathy) helps us as a society move forward in creating new opportunity for all.”
“Ideas excite me,” writes Nadella. “Empathy grounds and centers me.”
(c) All rights reserved. Copyright under United States Laws.