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by sjansen 2049 days ago
> Normally the people who rise up the ranks are the politically astute

Don't discount Nadella's political astuteness. I think it would be more accurate to say he is not merely politically astute, but instead able to combine his skill at internal politics with customer empathy and technical intelligence.
1 comments
texasbigdata 2049 days ago
The conversation in Satyas own book of the trip to try to recruit some HP exec with Balmer where Satya pushed to take over some division and Balmer reluctantly agreed on the flight down to SF but told Satya he better be able to execute and quickly or he should work on his parachute skills, alone is hilarious when viewed through the lens you describe.
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Rzor 2049 days ago
I just read that part of the book[0]. Actually, Satya says that Ballmer offered him the position because MS had to answer to AWS.

>[...] Steve had invested in it because [search][1] would require the company to compete in a sector beyond Windows and Office and build great technology—which he saw as the future of our industry. There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join.

>“You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.

But yeah, funny, though.

[0] The book is Hit Refresh, if anyone is curious.

[1] It was Bing: >There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field. Always a bold, courageous, and famously enthusiastic leader, Steve called me one day to say he had an idea. He wanted me to become head of engineering for the online search and advertising business that would later be relaunched as Bing, one of Microsoft’s first businesses born in the cloud.

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texasbigdata 2049 days ago
Thank you for the quote! I would be a bit skeptical of any highly ambitious executive’s self-described potentially revised historical narrative of their ascent, however his words are his words.

I don’t know about you but if my boss made a parachute joke while currently in a private plane flying south, it would be a scary thing.

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