Satya Nadella

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Satya Nadella
Nadella tells the story about his first round of interviews at Microsoft about 25 years ago. An up-and-coming Microsoft manager named Richard Tait asked Nadella a question. The question had nothing to do with coding or solving an engineering problem. Instead, Tait asked: “Imagine you see a baby laying the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?” – Nadella…
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Katherine Johnson

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Katherine Johnson
In the early decades of the 1900s, mathematical and technical calculations were made manually rather than by machine. This work required a large workforce to compute all the information. With the industrial boom brought on by WWII, organizations like NASA began recruiting women for this work, who they called “computers.” It has even been said that “the first computers wore skirts.” –…
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United Airlines

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United Airlines
When Kerry Drake got on his United Airline flight, the mother he was en route to see was facing her final hours. Drake knew that if he missed his connecting flight he would likely not see her before she passed. – After his first flight got delayed, Drake broke down into tears on the plane. The flight attendants soon noticed his state…
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Scott Guthrie

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Scott Guthrie
Scott Guthrie had been tapped by Steve Ballmer to lead the company’s fast-growing cloud computing service, called Azure. Guthrie visited Azure customers, and their feedback about their experience with the service was clear: Azure’s underlying technology was good, but it was hard to use. Guthrie knew Azure would never meet its growth expectations until it was much more customer-friendly. But how could…
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In California Hospital, Hand Hygiene Campaign was run for 90 days and there was a bonus announced of $1,200. On average, bonus-eligible hospital employees improved their performance during the 90 days of the initiative, but then progressively trailed back to levels of performance as low or worse. Physicians who were not eligible for bonus and demonstrated a slower improvement relative to the…
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Abu Jandal

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Abu Jandal
Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former chief body-guard was captured and put in a Yemini prison post 9/11. All attempts to get Abu Jandal to reveal information about Al Qaeda’s leadership had failed. However whilst the interrogation was going on, the interrogators noticed that Abu Jandal didn’t touch any of the cookies offered to him with tea. They later learned that he…
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Popcorn in the Movies

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Popcorn in the Movies
One Saturday, some unsuspecting moviegoers showed up at a suburban theater in Chicago to catch Mel Gibson’s action flick Payback. They were handed a soft drink and a free bucket of popcorn and were asked to stick around after the movie to answer a few questions about the concession stand. The popcorn though, had been carefully engineered to be wretched. Some got…
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Toothpaste Factory

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Toothpaste Factory
A toothpaste factory had a problem. Sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. Understanding how important it was to solve this problem, the CEO of the toothpaste factory gathered the top people in the company together. Since their own engineering department was already stretched too thin, they decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem.…
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Bob Chapman

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Bob Chapman
In 2008, the St. Louis-based manufacturing company Barry-Wehmiller suddenly lost 30 percent of their orders due to the effects of the recession. The company needed to save millions, so the board and the company’s CEO Bob Chapman got together to discuss layoffs. In the end, Chapman refused to let anyone go, so he and the board devised a furlough program, through which…
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Indra Nooyi and her Mother

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Indra Nooyi and her Mother
Story in Indra Nooyi’s Words – “I’ll never forget coming home after being named President of PepsiCo back in 2001. My mother was visiting at the time. “I’ve got great news for you,’ I shouted. She replied, ‘It can wait. We need you to go out and get some milk.” “So I go out and get milk. And when I come back,…
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