Do You Believe in the Mission?

It happens every morning. 

I swipe my badge on the card reader. I'm almost always late to my first meeting because I need to read the words:

Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

It sounds cheesy, but I truly do tear up. My teammates too--we all do. Every time we say the words. Every time our CEO Satya Nadella says the words, we tear up (in fact, I'm tearing up RIGHT NOW-geez)

Empower every person to do the thing! I mean, said in better Satya words, but you get it. Do you know what this means? It means we at Microsoft are not just here to make awesome things and say stuff like, “Yo, look at how smart we are!”

No, it’s not that. It’s to make sure the humans we serve have what they NEED to do what they MUST. We are not the hero of the story.

We’re the mentor. We’re the maker of the tools our hero needs. 

Who saw Wonder Woman? Great movie, right? Amazing hero.

Yeah, we're not Wonder Woman. We’re Wonder Woman’s aunt.  The one who teaches her to be a fighter. We’re the mentor. We’re the teacher of the skills and the maker of the tools our hero needs. 

No, our humans, our CUSTOMERS are the heroes of their stories.

What does this mean? This means that our big products are helping people use them to make their worlds a better place for everyone.

Who's worn a HoloLens? HoloLens is helping surgeons de-scarify spinal surgeries by overlaying the holograms of people's disks on their spine so they are not accidentally operating on the wrong one.

Azure is how our customer M-KOPA Solar has used technology to develop an affordable pay-as-you-go solar energy solution to provide electricity to more than 500,000 homes in Kenya. Their VR experience, Jua, lets people anywhere walk through a virtual Kenyan village to truly empathize with how much of an impact electricity can have on a household. Suddenly, parents no longer have to choose between using a lamp to let their children study, or cooking dinner.

OneNote is helping dyslexic children read and spell.

Yes, the work these big product teams are doing is exciting and world-changing. Did you know that there are also quite a collation of young people who decided to band together and make the world a better place outside of their day jobs.

These colleagues of mine are using their technical superpowers to change people's lives while creating software at Microsoft.

Clarice Chan

If you don't know Clarice Chan, you should make friends with her before she skyrockets to international stardom. She is a program manager, developer and designer working on Social Good for Windows. She created her OWN JOB at Microsoft to identify high impact issues, and to solve them using Windows technology. Her role was to spearhead the vision and execution of how Windows can make a local and global impact through people, product, and programs.

The most recent thing that blew my mind was Clarice's work to de-stigmatize feminine hygiene in the developing world in partnership with Days for Girls, an organization that is changing the status quo, through providing lasting hygiene solutions, health education, and income-generation opportunity. Thus far we’ve reached women and girls in 110+ countries. They are on target to reach 1 million women and girls by the end of 2017.

Vidya Srinivasan

Vidya is a program manager, a professional singer and a major advocate for inclusive design.

You know what OneWeek is? That's right, it's one week of the year that we stop business as usual and think about how we are living our mission. There is a major company-wide hackathon (the largest private hackathon in the world!) where employees form teams with people they don’t work with every day (this year, some teams solved problems alongside local non-profits) and tackle things that have been problems for society for decades. We figure that if we were going to solve these problems without tech, we probably would have solved them by now!

Vidya participated on a team at OneWeek a few years ago to enable paralyzed people to use technology to bring some freedom to their lives. With NFL star Steve Gleason as their customer, Vidya and her team were able to build a wheelchair that Steve could steer with eye-tracking. As of today, that same eye-tracking technology is now live in Windows preview builds. You can see a live demo of being able to type an article with your eyes here.

...and speaking of the Windows Insiders Team...during OneWeek in 2016, the team I work on, the Windows Insiders team realized that we didn't have a very good understanding of tech usage in emerging markets, especially for the most common job of all: the entrepreneur. Lots of studies and research shows that entrepreneurs in these regions actually run 3-5 businesses. This is an incredibly valuable group of people for us to understand better, so we decided to embark on a long-term customer study.

We launched two #Insiders4Good fellowships, one in Nigeria and one in East Africa, to help entrepreneurs turn their ideas into viable businesses using our technology. Every day we chat with our Fellows, learning about their progress and their needs to make their businesses successful. We’re incredibly impressed by the impact our fellows are already having in their local communities, such as Caleb Ndaka who has created a program to help teach kids to code--but also the adults who love them so kids have a support system of people to encourage them to keep learning when things get hard. Caleb has already reached 6300 kids! 

We love bringing back our learning to our Windows, Office and Azure product teams on how they can truly scale their product to the global community.

As you can see to enable any of these projects to happen, we had to work with and build things with people VERY different than us with very different needs. Clarice doesn't know what it means to be a rural girl in Nepal, Vidya doesn't know what it means to be paralyzed, the Insiders team doesn't know what it means to be an entrepreneur in an emerging market. We had to co-create the right solution with our customers, enabling them to be the heroes of their own stories.

Some skills we realized we needed were:

Emotional Intelligence - This is probably the thing no one talks about and everyone should be talking about. People with high emotional intelligence are the top leaders in companies and organizations. Having good emotional intelligence means being able to understand and manage your own emotions, but ALSO understand others emotions and use this to build relationships with them. This is absolutely necessary when you are trying to build teams and serve customers who are different than you. Currently, I'm (very slowly) reading this book on it and trying to practice every day. This is something anyone can grow and develop so I highly recommend you do!

Customer Feedback and Data - Being able to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers, analyze it and make decisions is a very important modern skill for people of any industry to have. We live by our customer feedback and data on the Windows Insiders team. Half of it is understanding humans and their feedback (see emotional intelligence bit above), the other half is having a good understanding of how to look at data. Once upon a time, we together took an online course to learn the concepts.

Art and Design - Notice that tech is no longer a thing that just lives behind a screen? It makes your world smarter now rather than just you. Since tech is living in the real world, it's more important than ever that we build for everyone in every situation. To do this, we need to include artists and designers as equal partners to understand how humans will react to tech such as voice, holograms, IOT, etc. For example, in the Windows App team, the decision makers are developers, program managers, data analysts and designers in equal quads. If you are passionate about art and design, please pursue this with passion!

Technical skills - Of course, this CS nerd thinks this is important. If we haven't been able to solve a problem so far without tech, it's time to actually apply tech to the problem. Note that this doesn't always mean coding. It's more having a good understanding of what exists and how it can be used. For example, what is the quickest way to set up a website with a database to store data?

Intersectionality - Our CEO Satya Nadella says it all the time: he wants us to bring our whole selves to work--who we are at home AND who we are at work are the only way we can start to solve global problems. If Clarice was not a developer, designer AND a social good advocate, if Vidya was not a program manager AND an inclusive design advocate, if I was not a software engineer, a writer, a designer AND a speaker, these projects wouldn't be happening right now. Only because we, along with our amazing teams and co-workers bring our whole selves to work every day, are these things possible. It's an AND!

So there you go, many of us are doing what it says on the badge we swipe in with every day. We're lucky this way. We earn our living by living our mission, empowering every person to do their thing.

If this mission stirs something within you, I hope you come join me and 100K others like me. We need for you to bring your whole self to work. To stay you. Learn some basic tech. Remain emotionally intelligent. Keep your passion for making the world a better place.

If this sounds like you, definitely get in touch with us.

Together, we’ll create scrappy little teams and change the world.

Thank you.

<3

Dona

PS: Everybody #NinjaCat!