STEVE BALLMER FULL SPEECH

well thank you um it is a pleasure to be here I have absolutely no idea what Paulina just said um she said it's a grand staged entrance there's a bio so I hope it was all nice uh but it is a real pleasure for me to have a chance to be here with you today uh I'm nervous this big speech for me one of the biggest of my life in fact and you're all looking at me like I'm a little nuts but I'll explain that uh I left Microsoft retired whatever the appropriate word is a month ago this first speech I'll give uh maybe the last too if it doesn't go well uh as something other than a Microsoft employee so I'm a little nervous about what do you talk about now I W up picking some themes that are about the same as I would have talked about when I was at Microsoft uh but I am clearly the former CEO and I speak you today just about some things uh that you know I would say upon reflection uh I learned about business and kind of business life uh we'll see how that goes uh I understand the way the for format works here if my first comments are dull you'll take me whatever's direction is interesting to you so uh let's let's try it out um I joined Microsoft uh 34 years ago uh at the time the company was 30 people we had done 2 A5 million of good Revenue the year before I started uh and you know I'd been let me just say screwing around in school uh during the first five years of the company's history and when I joined the company was already five years old uh you could say two and a half million is a lot of money and it is you could say 30 people is a lot of money is and it is but compared to the 80 billion or so of Revenue that we do today and 100 ,000 people I think it's probably fair to say I joined a startup uh I joined a startup and it's hard to talk about Microsoft like a startup now but I think I've got kind of a unique perspective I've worked from for a company of 30 people 100,000 people and every size in between and I think to myself wow that's pretty unique uh we've done things well we've screwed things up we've had a combination of all of the above but it does give you a little bit of lessons and perspective people want to say okay what do we do in our startup I say hey I have a couple ideas some CEO who's running some 40,000 person company I have some ideas uh and certainly one of the things you you learn as you go through this is no none of the phases are the same I mean the journey the ride the experience has been nothing short of amazing if nothing else in terms of its volatility I joined a company that existed before there was an IBM PC one of the in fact first things I did was go to I could wear a suit I was good at wearing a suit compared to all the other people in the startup so I became a Salesman uh on our first relationship with IBM building the IBM personal computer and you say wow you know there's a phase there where our whole world as a startup was about sort of helping this larger company Our Fate everything about our success as a tiny little 30 person company was by doing a good job of servicing the needs of this company that had I don't know 300,000 people even at that time and IBM was by far the biggest thing in the technology business we used to call it the bear ride the bear hang on to IBM and we spent about you know really probably five six years doing that until we got into a phase where we said okay what are we creating and crafting and that's really where we kind of birthed what I would consider modern Microsoft Windows and office late 80s early 90s we were in the process of giving birth to the business that would wind up really being the business on which our company would explode we went through a period Then where we did get some critical mass and all of a sudden you have to say well gez we were all about starting something we were bootstrapping windows and and and Word and Excel from nothing now all of a sudden it's about spinning that flywheel the hamster wheel that's a good thing to do in business when you have enough success that what you need to do is pedal fast that's good A lot of people try to Pedal fast before they have anything that's worth pedling and a lot of other people never pedal fast so it's kind of a life lesson get a good idea and then work like hell to make it popular that was a phase for microsof that was a wonderful phase probably the favorite phase is when you're taking something that you know is a germ of a good idea and you're just working hard on it you're scaling it up you're actually not thinking quite as hard you could say well that's a mistake and I'll say yeah you're sure right about that I'll come back to that as a life lesson in a minute but that was a wonderful phase then we get to what I'll call the dark years and if you're successful enough you're going to have dark dark ears why do you get dark ears if you're successful enough you can run a foul of antitrust legisl or anti trust authorities that's you could say whoa any startup would say I don't want that problem on the other hand most startups should say God I wish I was that popular enough for that to happen it's sort of a double-edged sword but you also find out that the thing that you did that made you successful on the first attempt may not sustain you one of the things I've learned about our business and and I guess this expression works just as well in the UK as it does in the US do you talk about a onetick pony pony you could teach one trick many companies are essentially one trick ponies I mean if you're a one trick pony in business you are fantastically successful you learned how to do something brilliantly you invented one thing you got it right that is Optimum and if you're you're a real great one trick pony your trick if you're lucky enough your trick might last for a 100 years or 200 years I mean Coca-Cola is basically a 100y old trick it's pretty good uh I know this is I'm running a little bit of danger with the next one but brand Oxford you know that's a what 900,000 year trick it's good one no I I mean that look I tell people if you can aspire to be anything in Brands aspire to be like Oxford or I went to Harvard I pick on Harvard but aspire to be on brands that always look at like they're The Cutting Edge even hundreds of years later but in a lot of businesses you're forced to do a second trick or you die and if you don't do your second trick and you could say you should do every trick you should do the second the third and the fourth and the fifth but really the history of business is most people do one trick they run with it as long as that trick works and then they fade out we were fortunate we came up with the second trick how do you really take microprocessors and push them in and do the backend automation of business there was a day when PE it's crazy now when there was a thing called a Mainframe that was actually a popular form of computing I I know this is a bit antique at this stage because my my 14-year-old asked me the other day Dad what does IBM do uh which okay maybe you're just old enough that that's not a stunning question but the truth of the matter is world I grew up IBM was everything for automating business Computing and yet we really pushed microprocessors into the very fabric of the Way businesses work that was our second trick and we basically out of those two tricks we have gotten 80 billion of Revenue and 20 billion of profit and people will ask me well why didn't you do the third trick right and I'm say damn I'm upset I let's call that phones just for a second and I say I don't know whether we were too busy or we only knew the tools of the first two tricks but we've done two and you know what the challenge is now those two tricks will go for a lot of years but in our industry you got to do a third trick there's no hundred-year tricks in the technology business and being a multi- trick pony if you do two tricks I'd say apple did two tricks they started they built the Mac they almost went Bang rupt jobs came back and they did a second trick around low power uh touch Computing which started with iPod and went from there it's an amazing company because it did two tricks we're an amazing company because we did two tricks and one of the questions you asked yourself is how do you do multiple tricks there's a few principles that I would highlight for this audience uh in terms of business success and the first one's probably not one that gets talked about as much as it should should that's that ideas do matter you really do need a powerful idea to have a business that's going to succeed whether it's at very small scale or very large scale you need an idea that is significant in the world today it's easy to read about start up this start up that start up the other thing I was in uh uh San Francisco the other day and people were basically telling me you can start businesses now and get Venture Capital without an idea that sort of interesting uh I would say the quality of most of the ideas that I hear about anyway they're just not that powerful and people spend too little time trying to get the right idea getting the right idea is really hard because you have to work at it you might have to fail at it you might have to modify it you might have to give it up and try another idea but You' got to decide how to think about the idea how anybody here seen an older movie movie called Thelma and Louise by any chance it's a story of uh with Susan Sarandon and Gina Davis and there're these two women who seem normal at the start of the movie and by the end they're driving their car off a cliff I won't fill in the details but it was Brad Pitt's first movie for those of you who care but you could say you know they really ran fast in that the by the end of the movie they were running fast I'm just not sure I would want to follow them off the and yet a lot of people say fall in love with their first idea and just keep at it and don't stop and say okay what are other ideas are there better ideas are there other ways to think about this idea and yet in business and I don't care whether you're as big as Microsoft is today or as small as Microsoft was the day I started ideas matter two tricks made the whole company basically and the third trick is out there waiting to be be invented or invented by a startup or a business that you'll join or a larger business that can do certain kinds of innovation but ideas matter second you better be passionate about whatever you want to do in life this is not just true startups big companies small passion matters too many people don't really get revved up and fired up and consumed heart Body and Soul by what they do and yet I find that sort of really sad you really want to do something you can fall in love with particularly coming right out of college I did it you know oh my resume I got to work on my resume I got to take a job where I can learn check the resume I'm going to have and okay maybe for one job that's okay it's not ideal but really finding something that you can get passionate about I was lucky I mean for me it was pure luck I never thought I was going to join a small company I always assumed I joined a big company my dad had worked for big company blah blah blah blah blah but I got to do so many things and help create basically a whole industry and I got and I was lucky I love the people I love the leadership I love the technology I love the impact on the world I love the fact that we had brainiacs who worked for us that was kind of cool could be a pain in the butt too but it was kind of cool I I found something that I loved and I do think passion passion absolutely matters optimism smart people love to be negative it's my basic sort of summary of Life smart people love to be critical they love to be negative they love to find fault and you have to to succeed on the other hand if you really want to be successful you have to stay optimistic Coen Powell who who ran the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the US has written books on leadership but he's got one line I love I love optimism is a force multiplier some of the folks I would was sitting down with uh uh I don't know what you call it the other part of the Union uh some of the union members before we started you know we were we were talking about goofy YouTube speeches and videos that some of them have watched of me speaking and why I am optimistic and leaders whether they're optimistic or not you better project it because if you're not leading with optimism if you don't believe nobody else is going to go your direction nobody's going to be with you nobody's going to follow nobody's really going to buy in so optimism passion uh execution and measurement you better stay on top of yourself and and really measure unless people measure themselves you don't get any better you cannot succeed unless you are really holding yourself accountable and owning outcomes believe me I've seen plenty of people at Microsoft various places in the tech industry brilliant people who when it came time to execute and actually count success and maybe not so much maybe not so much you could in order to do that you have to actually know what the goal is if the goal was to get to 450 million users and then sell the Facebook WhatsApp did a hell of a job right I mean that it's not a Ian it's a hell of a job at 19 billion 55 people that's a hell of a job but you have to decide what outcome do you want Bill Gates was offered half million to sell all of Microsoft in 1979 he would have been a rich guy if he had taken it richer if he didn't but a rich guy but even putting that aside the impact on society wouldn't have been the same we had discussions with Facebook about buying Facebook but Zuckerberg knew what he viewed as a an outcome that he really desired and was willing to put in the Blood Sweat and Tears just like we were so execution and measurement are hugely important and yet people let themselves uh off the hook you got to get the weit room I don't know if that expression works at all but I'll explain it uh certainly in American football about the most important thing you can do is get yourself stronger and a lot of companies don't do that they're good at something and then they don't build new muscle they don't train I mean right now you'd say hey look you got a small market share in the phone business Steve why do you guys even screw around BL blah blah cuz we're in the wait room baby we're getting good we're getting to know what it really takes to make small form factor devices we're really understanding what's capable what's possible in the hardware if you don't get in the weight room you can't win the next Generation you can't if Apple had not been a hardware company with some software they couldn't have come back in the generation the of the iPod even with Steve Jobs returning if we hadn't built the muscle that we've built in search we'd have no cap possibility of doing some of the things that we're doing it's a lesson that I think very few businesses companies governments they're not willing to do things that don't lead to immediate immediate productivity and then I would say last but not least you guys got to be hardcore I tried to come up with better words tenacious bold longterm and I kind of mean all of those you just got to be hardcore people will encourage you to give up on everything people have some notion that success startups boom they're just immediately successful that is not true I could say that more forcefully but I won't that is not true most startups most anything you work at it five 10 15 years before things really emerge it's the exception that emerges in two or three years and you've got to make a big long-term bet you got to have an idea that matters you got to stay after it you've got to measure yourself but you have got to be hardcore optimistic for sure realistic for sure measuring yourself tuning your idea but you just have to stay build the new capabilities that you need but stay hardcore and committed uh for the future I think back on 34 years of working for companies of all sizes and it without using the Powerpoints I had done that's what I remember that I wanted to share with you I will say that when you're all done with something it's it's it's sort of an amazing thing 34 years other than my family I put my heart soul I have basically hardly any hobbies a little bit of golf but hardly any hobbies not much that I do except work and be with my family I'll have to figure out what the new form of work is for me but then you reflect and you say okay what what do do you really get excited about and I think back and I say God it was kind of cool we birthed an industry I was one of many people who's part of it but I I feel good about that you feel good about your successes you feel your mistakes and believe me I feel mistakes I know what mistakes we've made along the way and I I feel badly about them you can't change them but I remember them you remember uh people uh people that I'll stay friends with and stay in touch with and people I will never see again in my life I've had the experience of probably meeting as many people I will never talk to again as anybody other than politicians or something maybe more because I get to do it in more countries than your average politician and yet you know there's just amazing people I've had a chance to to talk to see learn from I won't name names right now but one of the coolest was a guy guy I met on my very last trip I was traveling in Europe a political leader in some country not to be named and the guy actually sung a song to me and I just think back wow I got a chance to see some re it was karaoke I don't want you to get the wrong idea uh about that uh it was kind of a karaoke kind of thing uh and then you think about the stories to me the by far the most thing fun thing the fun story two of them the night we signed our first contract with IBM to do the original operating system on the IBM PC still I can think of that evening and I'm exhilarated I remember the process I remember the first sales call the second the third the fourth we worked on this thing for a year a year later we signed the contract I can tell you where we went out and had a drink we watch the TV show Dallas it was an important EP it's back in a new form today but it was a modern show uh in in 1981 that to me was huge but the big night 1995 it's really the night computers took off for all intent purposes the launch of Windows 95 and I was driving around from computer store to computer store to computer store with two or three guys just watching to see how people would respond to buying these new computers uh with Windows 95 which really the first time and that's when PCS went from being a 10 million year a year phenomenon to Growing to be about 300 million a year which it is today but it took off on the back of that and to see people and to see them lining up and queuing up for the first time I got to say was as exhilarating as anything uh I've ever done I thought I'd share a little bit uh when paen and I were talking on the phone it seemed okay to spend maybe 20 minutes sharing some thoughts so I will but I think mostly we're we're going to do Q&A and I'll turn it over to Paulina to tell us how to do that thank you all very much um

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 51,787

Keywords: Union, Society, University, Debates, Debating, Interview

Id: LMb_4OBgWIY

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 24 2015