I highly recommend reading the book yourself as he talks about his personal life and how it has affected his professional life. If I had to summarize his value and meaning of leadership, I’d take this quote of the man himself:
The longer I thought about it, the more I questioned what had prompted us to create personal computers in the first place. We make things that help other people make things and make a difference.
The following short abstract contains my key take-aways.
Leadership
My 6 favorite take-aways about core principles of leadership:
- Recognize potential opportunities and consider them. Take action before it will be obvious for everyone.
- After your well-thought judgement, make your decision. Don’t expect consensus of others but believe in the reason why you make this call. Be confident.
- Embrace uncertainty and face the competition. It get’s intimidating but shift your focus from the competitor to the achievement of your goal.
- Have and communicate your goals with clear vision and enthusiasm. This will contagiously generate energy and motivation, leading to innovation for you and for your peers.
- Build confidence in your team by giving them responsibility. With trust and empathy as a leader, it will bring the best out of them.
- Team > Ego. Prioritizing your ego and your recognition above the team collaboration may destroy the chance to succeed. When the team wins, everybody wins.
Culture
Culture is a complex system of how an organization thinks and acts. But what defines Microsoft’s culture in particular?
- Customer Obsession. Listen and understand the situation of the customer. It is not about how great the product is. It is about how great the product serves the customer to enable their success.
- Fair and friendly competition. Be competitive but understand when it makes sense to work with competitors. Collaboration can bring overall value to the customer.
- One Microsoft. Belonging to a specific department should not set boundaries. Building on the ideas of others and collaboration leads to the growth of the company as a whole.
Most importantly: The culture is shaped by one and all individual. It’s the people who contribute to a thriving culture with enthusiasm, hard work and a growth mindset ❤️
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset helps you to reach your full potential and achieve more. People with growth mindset know that everything can be learned. Here are 6 qualities to develop a growth mindset:
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Challenges are opportunities to learn.
There are no failures, but learnings. It’s okay to make mistakes as long as you take responsibility for it. Be confident in taking new challenges. This will eventually drive self-improvement.
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Constructive feedback for greater outcomes.
Ask for genuine assessments of peers and supervisors. This feedback will help you to reflect and achieve even more extensive results in the next project.
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The only constant is change.
It is essential to unlearn old habits as well as to learn new habits.
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Embrace uncertainty and take responsibility.
There will always be risks. It’s about how agile you are and how you react on it. Learn from the obstacles and focus on the solution.
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Build on top of existing resources of others for further outcome.
This can be far more efficient. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to be effective.
Diversity & Inclusion
Why Diversity and Inclusion is essential in EVERY company.
- It challenges us to step out of our prejudices, we learn to have empathy and thus change our behavior …
- … leading us to harmoniously collaborate with each other, exchange ideas and thus create better products …
- … with better products, we bring value to the customer and eventually make them happy.
I always like to refer to this McKinsey study where a homogeneous and diverse teams were compared. The results have shown that diverse teams achieve a better performance by up to 36 %.
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