Test Page 1 of the Process to Iterate and Confirm Bestseller Quality

INTRODUCTION

“The company was sick.”

— Satya Nadella

Redmond, Thanksgiving Weekend, 2013

In the Fall of 2013, a software engineer at Microsoft named Satya Nadella was tapped to apply for a job he never imagined he’d one day be eligible for — the company’s top job: CEO of Microsoft. 

Needless to say, submitting your candidacy to become a CEO is not your typical job application. The board at Microsoft had identified several candidates, and a major step in the process was to give each candidate a set of tough questions they needed to answer and submit back to the board, questions like what is your vision for the company, and how would you execute to achieve it? Nadella figured he had nothing to lose, so he set aside a couple of days during Thanksgiving weekend, 2013, to write out his answers.

Nadella was not, truth be told, ambitious for the top job. At least not in the usual sense. Instead, he was frustrated, angry, disappointed, and yearning for change. He had seen first-hand how things had gone terribly wrong at Microsoft. He had witnessed the internal backbiting. He had seen the cartoons and jokes in the press making fun of Microsoft’s woes. And above all, he was frustrated that the passion and sense of mission that was everywhere when he joined the company in the 1990s were now all but gone. 

So Nadella poured his heart into the answers he wrote down, and before the weekend was over he had banged out a detailed 10-page memo to the board. 

The memo was a blueprint for how Microsoft needed to change, and the board liked what it saw. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that that one memo would alter the course of history at Microsoft. And given Microsoft’s place in the world, it’s not a stretch to say that the memo would ultimately have a sizable impact on the world itself. 

Nadella became Microsoft’s new CEO on February 4, 2014. 

But this is not the place to tell that full story. The short message to absorb here is that what ended up transpiring at Microsoft over the next 4 years is a stunning story that has a lot to teach us about change and change initiatives. 

And we need to become good students of these lessons if we are ever to defy that scary statistic that 70% of change initiatives typically fail.