Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22324
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Dov Fischer
• Date: 01 April 2018

153

© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22324

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover

Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better

Future for Everyone

Dov Fischer

BOOK REVIEWED

Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, and

Jill Tracie Nichols, 2017, Hit

Refresh: The Quest to Redis-

cover Microsoft’s Soul and

Imagine a Better Future for

Everyone (New York: Harper-

Collins), 272 p, forward by

Bill Gates.

In 2014, at the age of 46,

Satya Nadella was named as

Microsoft’s third CEO in its

40-year history. During his

first three years at the helm,

the company has experienced

a renaissance on Wall Street.

It is now the third most valu-

able company after Apple and

Alphabet and trades at levels

not seen since its heyday two

decades ago.

In “Hit Refresh”, Nadella

describes his journey, which

began in India as the only child

of a high-level civil service

father and teacher mother.

The journey continues as a

young immigrant in the United

States studying at University of

Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where

he earned a master’s degree. At

age twenty-five (1992), Nadella

joined Microsoft and began his

steady climb up its ranks. The

book describes the leadership

qualities that enabled Nadella,

who had few noticeable advan-

tages, to rise to the very top of

the business world.

The book can be classified

in the leadership/strategy/inno-

vation genres. However, Nadel-

la’s business experience and

philosophy also contain impor-

tant lessons for finance profes-

sionals. Nadella’s first high-

profile assignment was to head

Microsoft’s faltering cloud

business in 2010. At the time

the Servers and Tools business

(since renamed Commercial

Cloud) was Microsoft’s third

largest business after Office and

Windows. Nadella quickly real-

ized that Servers and Tools was

doing a great job at servicing its

existing customer base, but was

missing out on the fast-growing

cloud business: “Each leader

in the group was, in essence,

CEO of a self-sustaining busi-

ness… they were making all

this money and now this little

squeaky thing called the cloud

came along and they didn’t

want to bother with it” (p. 57).

Cloud services were already

generating billions of dollars

in revenues for Amazon, which

had a near-monopoly on the

business.

Nadella’s challenge was

to motivate the Servers and

Tools leadership to embrace

the cloud vision. To accomplish

this, Nadella leveraged the busi-

ness’s existing strength, namely

its expertise in enterprise cus-

tomers’ internal networks. The

result was a hybrid cloud strat-

egy that combined the security

of internal networks with the

access of public clouds. The les-

son for leaders of change is to

build on existing competencies.

This is even more important

for psychological reasons than

for strategic and tactical rea-

sons. This hybrid approach to

embracing the cloud opportu-

nity gave Nadella’s team a sense