Cultural Renaissance: An inside perspective of how Microsoft became the world's most valuable company

It is a known fact that our human intuition is not built to scale. We usually come across this limitation when we are trying to seek answers to some of our biggest questions, such as how big is the universe, or how long did it take life to evolve. With that said, we do not need to resort to such cases to test this in our daily lives. Here is a simple example of time scale that always blows my mind: How long would take one to count to one million? The answer is, approx. 11.5 days. Now, how about to count to one trillion? Well, in this case the answer is, one could not, as it would take 32 thousand years to do so.

After Microsoft released its FY19 results its market value jumped to a record high of $1.1 trillion dollars. Let’s that sink in for a moment…

A couple of weeks ago, I created this LinkedIn post where I tried to articulate my mental state following my attendance of Microsoft Ready and nomination to this year’s Platinum Club award. The word I chose to best describe that experience was surreal. In choosing this word, I was not referring to last century's cultural movement surrealism, but the dreamlike experience I had gone through that week.

For those of you outside Microsoft, the Platinum Club is our premier award program that rewards our highest performing individuals. Winners are recognised and therefore invited to attend Microsoft Ready and some special events. The announcement of winners can happen as late as a few days before the event - which was my case.

That meant that within 36 hours from the announcement, I was sitting on a plane heading to Las Vegas to attend my first summer Ready, meet the senior leadership team, be recognised on the stage in front of thousands of people, and watch Queen (live!) in a private Microsoft event.

The whole experience became even more surreal when I looked back at Microsoft’s mission statement and watched Satya and the SLT's core notes. Several colleagues had said to me that you must attend Microsoft Inspire + Ready in Vegas before you’re able to comprehend the magnitude of our business, which is a sentiment I can now attest. After all, it is only during this conference that you can witness 40,000 people converging towards that one vision to create a positive impact in the world.

It is in this context that I find myself attending a dinner party hosted by our SLT with a select few award winners and realise: “Wait a moment! These guys are trying to solve the world’s most challenging problems, and yet they are here hanging out with us?” Are events like this the best use of these brilliant minds time when they could be focused in “empowering every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more”? How many more people in the world would now have access to AI had Satya not stood there for 30 mins taking group photos with award winners? How many investment decisions would Amy Hood have done to better leverage her 1.1 trillion-dollar portfolio in the few hours she spent at the event?

The experience and thoughts above bring me to the point I'm trying to make in this article, which I introduce with the following questions: Where else does this happen nowadays? How many organisations out there have the commitment (and conditions) to invest so massively in the development of their employees and partners? Not many.

This is when I came across Craig Milner’s post “What happens when the leaders of the world’s greatest company turn out to be nice people” and realised: This empowering starts from within.

Microsoft’s cultural transformation since Satya took the reins as CEO is undeniably one of the greatest business success stories in recent years, but an often untold facet of this story relates to how this transformation cascaded down the organisation to empower each individual contributor to pursue their aspirations, take risks and create an impact. This impact driven approach encourages and rewards individuals based on their contribution towards their teams, business and customers.

So far this sounds just like a rehashing of the old performance management practices we see in every major organisation. The people centric culture and values that shape this process and the leadership mindset that embraces them, however, are, in my view, what makes the true difference in Microsoft’s success story.

If you read Satya’s book and are familiar with the cultural transformation journey Microsoft has been going through, you will be aware it is grounded in key values such as customer obsession, one Microsoft, growth mindset, diversity and inclusion and so on. Every organisation will have similar “values” stated in their HR pages, however that is not the test. The test is whether these companies abide by these values during difficult times.

The test is whether these companies abide by these values during difficult times

Prior to Microsoft, I had spent most of my career working for organisations with a strong engineering background and therefore heavily focused on processes and numbers. Although these companies also had their value statements, the perception I had was these always came second. The result was the creation of an environment with no cultural resiliency, where values were “out the window” on the first signs of strain. A good example of that was HP. Meg Whitman started her CEO tenure around the time I joined the company. Soon after that she announced a 5-year business transformation strategy that ultimately reduced HP’s 320,000 workforce to 115,000 people (HP Inc. and HPE combined). At no time in this period did I feel this was a strategy created to better the solutions to our customers - instead, this was unquestionably a move to appease Wall Street.

Microsoft’s cultural resilience was also tested in the early stages of its renaissance with a move that left many Windows Phone fans (me included) intrigued: The Nokia write-off. How could Microsoft abandon such an incredible product and write-off such massive investment? Although Windows Phone had established itself as a “niche” product, it had become engrained in the overall Windows ecosystem (Windows 8 Metro UI anyone?) and in Microsoft’s “red ocean” go-to-market approach. Satya’s decision to scrap it did not represent the abandonment of a product, but of a legacy that was no longer compatible with Microsoft’s new vision and cultural attributes.

The Nokia write-off was just one of countless examples where the new vision, culture and value system spearheaded by the SLT created an environment of which the overall organisation could stand behind. The resulting effect was the creation of a workforce that is empowered, willing to take risks and pursue their greatest ambitions. The mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more is undeniably ambitious, I don’t know how long it will take us to get there, but I guess Microsoft can cross my name off that list.