New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture

jfruh (300774) writes New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that he and his leadership team are taking "important steps to visibly change our culture" and that "nothing is off the table" on that score. While much of his declaration consists of vague and positive-sounding phrases ("increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes"), he outlined his main goals for the shift: reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision; quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends; and increasing investment for employee training and development.

Comments

translation

[Anonymous Coward]

reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision = layoffs

quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends = every ms product will have facebook-like privacy-infringing malware

  increasing investment for employee training and development = get more h1b visas to replace us workers with foreign code monkeys

So...zero US employees?

[gelfling]

Sounds good. To Malaysia and Beyond!

Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

This is precisely why higher the CEO pay results in poorer performance by the company. All that pay, blinds the CEO, makes them think they are invincible, if the market is shoving that many billion dollars their way, they must be doing everything right. It sets up the eco system where flatterers, sycophants and yes men thrive insulating the CEO from real news and real feedback.

To think one man, with some initiative can change the culture of a company the size of Microsoft, with entrenched interests, history of turf warfare and empire building is blowing smoke. That company went through spectacular expansion and growth in the 1990s. All those very capable people, the ones who have the vision and ability and the guts to skate too close to or even past the edges of legal behavior have all cashed out, burnt out or pushed out. As the able ones leave, the fraction of PHBs who are clueless when there is not a de-facto monopoly increases. They are playing the same game that used to be effective when there was a WinTel monopoly on desktops, and desktops had the monopoly on computing.

A truly visionary CEO will realize this, break the company into pieces that will once again compete or perish and resign. But Satya Nadella is no Michail Gorbachev.

Re:Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are also under the delusion that the CEO's actions really matter. If you took the CEOs with the best track records and brought them in to run the businesses with the worst performance, how often would those companies become more profitable?.....the answer is roughly 60%. That isn't much better than the flip of a coin.

And I"m to find another stat that said that a CEO contributes about 5% to a company's bottom line.

There have been CEOs - Lou Gerstner's turn around of IBM in the early 90s comes to mind - that may have been worth it.

But all in all, they are over paid for what they do. Yahoo!'s new CEO, for example, is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Marissa was the great blond hope for Yahoo! but she is turning out to be mediocre - like most CEOs. But, regardless of what happens, she'll get her $60 million - remember that when you bust your ass to meet a deadline and during your review you are told you could have done more and therefore you are rated as only "meeting objectives" and you just get a cost of living raise (1.5% If you didn't bust your ass working 60 hours a week for months, you would have gotten a "below standards" rating, no raise and if lucky you keep your job until they offshore your entire department.).

Yep, we live in a meritocracy all right.

Apache

[tepples]

Indians. Hmmm... So does this mean Microsoft is giving up IIS and switching to Apache?

Re:Manager

[raddan]

(disclaimer: I have interned at Microsoft for the past three summers; I do not speak for them)

I think your criticism against lock-in is fair, and this is clearly one of Microsoft's strategies, and I suspect that it will continue to be to some degree. But on the language front, you are wrong. Not only are Microsoft's newest languages open-source (F#, TypeScript), but they are also cross-platform and collaboratively developed with open source groups. And, of course, you can run all .NET languages on the Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. with mono.

While it is theoretically possible that all of this is a deadly Microsoft-bait-and-switch just waiting to happen, having worked at Microsoft, I can say that doing so would fly in the face of a lot of hard work by many, many people there. I was as critical about Microsoft as you were (dig into my /. history and you'll see) until I worked there. Not only is it a great place to work, but the company really is committed to changing its culture. Use of open-source tools at Microsoft used to be strictly-prohibited. Now they have a fast-track process for working with them. Open-sourcing of Microsoft software was also a complete non-starter. Now putting Microsoft code up on the web is increasingly routine, and they even have their own open-source hosting ala GitHub that has git bindings.

Microsoft is a big company (the Redmond campus is mind-bogglingly huge to me) and they have a lot of corporate momentum. Despite this, in my opinion, I've seen my daily interactions with people do a complete 180 in the last couple of years. Microsoft knows that the era of selling boxed copies of proprietary software is coming to an end. So you're simply wrong about Microsoft not being able to change.

what should be off the table

[bzipitidoo]

Nothing is off the table? Does the table include lying, doublespeak, file format lock in, using proxies to sue Linux users, bribing and strongarming standardization committee members, the whole embrace, extend, and exterminate strategy that they tried with Java and IE, Windows Genuine Advantage, staying in bed with the copyright extremists of the entertainment industry, continued support of organizations like the Business Software Alliance? Is any of that off the table?

If MS's new CEO isn't acknowledging that they went too far with that stuff, and that the company will go in a new direction, stop being anti-social, stop being evil, then the new CEO represents no real change, just some minor adjustments.