Microsoft battled for successful transformation
Good morning! Welcome to Mister Sivann’s digital learning column, Mister Sivann & The Answer. This week we continue to talk about a world-class and essential company, but we are turning our sight to Microsoft. Let’s look at how Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft Corporation, “hits refresh,” led Microsoft’s successful transformation.
Thus, there is a question, why does Microsoft want to transform? Transformation is because of the sense of crisis. As the well-deserved king of the personal computer (PC) era, Microsoft has been the technology company with the highest market value in the world for many years in a row.
However, the later Microsoft almost completely missed the mobile Internet time and lagged behind its competitors in the fields of smart terminals, search engines, social media, and e-commerce.
Microsoft’s decline is evident from the company’s market value: at the end of 1999, Microsoft’s market value hit a historical peak of 600 billion U.S. dollars and then fell all the way down. By 2013, the market value had fallen by more than half, leaving only 220 billion U.S. dollars.
At that time, the outside world commented that Microsoft had become a company that specialized in patching computers and had become insignificant in people’s daily lives. Within Microsoft, there is also pessimism: employees believe that Microsoft has lost its innovative soul and can no longer lead the technological trend of the new era.
What’s more terrible is that Microsoft, which used to change the world as its mission, has degenerated into a bureaucratic system. Everyone is busy with internal conflicts and has no time to pay attention to changes in the external world. Someone once drew a cartoon, satirizing Microsoft’s organizational culture in which various departments form gangs and are hostile to each other, and they all point guns at each other. You can see this cartoon in the manuscript.
It was under such internal and external difficulties that Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, took office in February 2014. At that time, the outside world was not optimistic about Nadella. From the appearance, Nadella is a slightly shy image of an Indian technical geek, always with a humble smile; from the resume, Nadella is an out-and-out corporate insider who has already Over 20 years at Microsoft.
Does such a person really have the ability and courage to sweep away old habits and lead Microsoft on the road of drastic reform? The outside world is generally skeptical. However, to everyone’s surprise, Nadella showed shocking leadership skills, and his reforms brought immediate results.
Microsoft seems to have been reborn in the short five years from 2014 to the present. It has made full efforts in the fields of cloud computing, mobile applications, and intelligent hardware. At the same time, it has actively deployed cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. The company has once again stood on the top of the technological wave.
Microsoft’s stock price has also swept away the decline, rising rapidly since 2014, and its market value has doubled in just three years; by December 2018, Microsoft’s total market value has exceeded 850 billion U.S. dollars, surpassing Apple to become the company with the highest market value in the world.
Therefore, there are two aspects that Nadella Microsoft’s successful transformation. The two aspects of Microsoft’s battle for transformation, first, at the business level he promoted strategic transformation, and second, at the organizational level he drove cultural change. How exactly did Nadella do it all? We will discuss this in detail in the next articles.
