The Advice That Changed Satya Nadella's Life

you've now had to follow Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to legendary figures did you feel at that time that you're really ready for the job following those legends or were you saying I can't do a better job than they did the best advice I got from both bill and Steve I think helped me a lot because the clear message was don't try to be like us don't even bother to sort of say oh I'm succeeding these people just be wrong in fact I remember very distinctly even during the interview process this is true for the board was conducting they asked me hey do you want to be the CEO and I said only if you want me to be the CEO and the feedback I got was well but people who want to be CEOs are like I want to be CEO I said look that's not me and I remembered when I'm going and talking to Steve and he says yeah just be yourself it's too late to change since you've been the CEO three and a half years the stock is up about I guess it's about a hundred and twenty percent when you go to the your annual shareholder meetings and you get a standing ovation for what you've done there's no I get a lot of people to asking me hey look come home and fix my computer okay you are a native of India what part of India I was born in Hyderabad which is in the central part of India and so growing up your parents doted on you I assume yeah they did and they told you you were gonna be prime minister or something important in the country what did they want you to be they just wanted me to stop playing cricket and take my studies a little more seriously now you were an avid cricket player yes that is correct I was in love with it yeah and when did you realize you weren't going to be a professional cricket it's pretty soon quickly I realized that at best I would pay you know you know what is considered perhaps first-class cricket in India but I was not going to go much further than that but you know then I that's where my dad in fact I remember one of the big decisions that changed my life was you know my entire outlook was so provincial when I look back at it Richards hey I want to stay in Hyderabad maybe study economics in full illegal signs and work for a bank that was about the extent of my ambition and he looks at me he says what are you doing you gotta get out of this place and so he pushed me out to get to an engineering school and that pretty much of course you know define the trajectory after his father was a member of the the senior civil service which was an important position I guess in D&D is that right yeah my dad was a very different guy than me in terms of let me say his academic promise so it is always humorous which you look at my report cards and he says oh I couldn't I don't understand how anybody can have these kind of marks and but the nice thing about it was he would say it in such endearing ways that he'd never made me feel bad I mean the marks weren't high enough or weren't not high enough they weren't high enough yeah the guy had never met an exam he didn't ace as he would say and so he was it was astounding to me that he would have a son who couldn't A's an exam now your father's still alive yes he must be very proud of what you've achieved not enough so you went to college in India and then you decided to get a graduate school in the United States yeah where did you go I went University Wisconsin in Milwaukee for my computer that's when I switched from electrical engineering to computer science but when you're in India University of wisconsin-milwaukee can't be that well-known in India so how did you happen to wind up there I've never been to west to Bombay quite frankly and then I showed up in Milwaukee did you have a winter coat or what that was my first very valued possession in life our winter coat which is very important unfortunately I'd picked up this bad habit of smoking in India in college and the one nice thing about going to school in Milwaukee is you as fear a smoker you have to go out in the winter and smoke and that one winter in Milwaukee cured me of my smoking hat so you've got a job after you graduated at Sun Microsystems and what was your job there I was a software developer Hey and then you got recruited to go to another company called Microsoft and that was in 1992 that's right so but you also had applied to go the University of Chicago School of Business so how did you decide to do one or the other frankly David I I was very committed to saying oh I want to go to the business school maybe who knows maybe even go to Wall Street aha that's what sort of my the highest calling of mankind say is David Rubenstein and I thought wow maybe that's what I should do and then somewhere along the lines I started talking to people and I said hey why would you do that you were in tech and you should really come back it was an amazing time because Windows NT which eventually became a server business and what-have-you was just starting out and and I subsequently went and did some combination of part-time and other courses and actually finish my MBA which I find stunning in money you're commuting in other words you were working and then on weekends you're commuting universe Chicago and that must have taken a lot of energy to do both it was crazy

Channel: Bloomberg Television

Views: 2,283,861

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: rKCL_MEXqJo

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017