Satya Nadella shares a habit with Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates. Both leaders are voracious readers who apply what they learn to propel their organizations into the future. Although Nadella is largely credited for leading Microsoft’s transition from a Windows-centric company to a cloud-first company, his reading habit is the fuel behind his success.
In business school, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had read Young Men and Fire. The book tells the story of a 1949 tragedy when thirteen ‘smokejumpers’ (parachuting firefighters) who lost their lives in a forest fire. The book provides a lesson in the need to build trust and credibility with your team.
As it goes, the lead firefighter knew that he had to build a small fire to escape the bigger one. “But no one followed him. He had the skills to get his men out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t built the shared context needed to make his leadership effective. His team paid the ultimate price,” Nadella writes. “I was determined not to make the same mistake.”
Nadella saw himself as the lead firefighter–his mission was to convince a team to adapt a counter-intuitive strategy at Microsoft–to shift from the tools that paid everyone’s salary to embrace what was then a tiny cloud business.
Today, Microsoft’s cloud business is growing 48 percent year over and year, generating over 9 billion dollars in its latest quarter.
**Source: https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/the-real-secret-behind-ceo-satya-nadellas-success-at-microsoft.html
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