Satya Nadella isn’t a fan of letting memes define Microsoft.
The Microsoft CEO discussed the impact of a 2011 cartoon that depicted tension between the company’s various divisions during a Tuesday episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast.
“That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality,” Nadella told Stripe cofounder John Collison.
Manu Cornet
The drawing was part of a larger set of drawings by cartoonist Manu Cornet that poked fun at the Big Tech org charts. For Microsoft’s chart, three separate divisions were illustrated aiming guns at each other.
“I’d say there are two things that I learned from that entire episode because I always say, look, I’m a consummate insider, right? Anything good and bad about Microsoft of the last 35 years, I lived through them all, and I’m part of it, right?” Nadella said. “So I can’t deny any of it. The thing that I felt was, a little bit of that was just we lost our own belief because we lost the narrative.”
“So this doesn’t mean, oh, wow, we were all perfect divisions and we were all sort of, you know, in greater harmony. That is not the case,” Nadella added. “But you know, in some sense, some of these divisional tensions are real issues that need to have tension, right?”
Nadella also suggested that there can be a time and a place for rivalry within a large organization.
“Social cohesion is not a goal. Winning in the marketplace is a goal,” Nadella said on the podcast. “But at some level, you have to orchestrate these large organizations — in fact, you might even have two competing teams, by design.”
However, the cartoon is an example of how external voices, like memes, can shape how employees internally view their workplace culture, the CEO said. That’s when executives and managers have to ensure they’ve built enough trust with workers to withstand the influence of social media.
“How to communicate in today’s world where your employees read about you outside and form opinions about you is one of the toughest leadership challenges,” Nadella said.
It’s not the first time Nadella has addressed the over-decade-old cartoon. In his 2017 book, “Hit Refresh,” he wrote that he was upset that Microsoft’s own people “just accepted it.”
“As a twenty-four-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me,” Nadella wrote.
The cartoon came out years before he took over as CEO in 2014, but turning around the company’s culture was Nadella’s “highest priority” when he took the helm, he said in the book. He said he’d do so by removing barriers to innovation and creating a narrative from the top that shapes individual teams.
His shift to a “growth mindset” and “learn-it-all versus know-it-all” culture appears to be working more than a decade into his tenure. Nadella has grown Microsoft from a roughly $300 billion company to the second to reach a $4 trillion market cap, a milestone it crossed in October. The CEO has also positioned the company well in the AI arms race, investing early in OpenAI.
Still, external voices can be loud at times.
“I would say the challenge for all of us in today’s world is, let the social media memes not define us,” Nadella told Collison. “What’s that inner strength that is there in an organization that can, in fact, resist the social meme — that I think is the key.”
