Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella applies Buddha's empathy principle to Life and Business
The global pandemic lockdown did not impact Microsoft’s business. Its revenues rose 18% to $168 billion, in the fiscal year that ended June 2021. Operating profits rose 32% to $70 billion, the Redmond, Washington based company announced today. It has a stock market value of $2.2 trillion.
Microsoft’s products and services include Windows operating software – there are more than 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10; Word, Excel and Power Point in its Office software; Xbox video gaming platform, with more than 100 million users; Surface tablet computers; cloud servers and services with systems that every day analyze 6.5 trillion digital signals to identify emerging threats and protect customers; and LinkedIn, the networking platform used by 774 million, primarily by professionals and office workers, in more than 200 countries.
“Our results show that when we execute well and meet customers’ needs in differentiated ways in large and growing markets, we generate growth, as we’ve seen in our commercial cloud – and in new franchises we’ve built, including gaming, security, and LinkedIn, all of which surpassed $10 billion in annual revenue over the past three years,” Satya Nadella, chief executive officer and chairman said in the company’s earnings statement.
Nadella, 53 years old, took over as CEO in February 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock has risen more than six-fold, gaining an estimated $1.8 trillion in market value.
In fiscal 2020, Nadella received $44 million in salary, equity and other compensation. His stock ownership in the company is worth $570 million. He was appointed chairman of the board in June this year.
Nadella, who joined Microsoft in 1992, most recently served as head of its cloud infrastructure and services group. Under him, the cloud business outperformed the market and took shares from Amazon, Google, Oracle and other rivals.
Previously, Nadella led research and development for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at Sun Microsystems.
Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Nadella’s early ambition was to be a professional cricketer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, affiliated with Mangalore University, India; a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee; and an MBA from the University of Chicago in 1996.
Nadella serves on the board of trustees to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Chicago. He is also on the board of Starbucks.
He is married to Anupama, an architect. They have three children and live in Bellevue, Washington. Nadella and Anu’s fathers were both in the Indian Administrative Service, the most senior rank of officers in the central government.
In 2020, in a LinkedIn post paying homage to his father who passed away, Nadella wrote that perhaps the most enduring of his father’s “life lessons was the need to keep an open mind and to keep curiosity alive throughout one’s life…His overall life’s pursuit was clear: working as a public servant creating systems that could deliver on universal rights (food, housing, health, education, employment) in spite of India’s complexity, constraints, and scale. To meet these ends, he was comfortable borrowing from both Marx and Hayek.”
Nadella’s 2017 book, “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone,” was a New York Times bestseller.
In the book, he discusses individual change, the transformation at Microsoft and “the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing.”
He also writes about a personal challenge. Dealing with oldest child Zain’s severe cerebral palsy led him to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Buddha, writes Nadella, did not set out to found a world religion. Buddha sought to find out why we suffer.
“I learned (from Buddha) that only through living life’s ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence.”
Nadella posts regularly on LinkedIn, where he has over nine million followers. In one post, he says he wrote the book hoping it “inspires people to discover more empathy in their own lives.” In addition to impacting individuals, he sees empathy as “a quality that shapes our mission of empowerment at Microsoft and our quest to meet unmet and unarticulated needs of customers…(Empathy) helps us as a society move forward in creating new opportunity for all.”
“Ideas excite me,” writes Nadella. “Empathy grounds and centers me.”
Editorial Comment: Are Indian Professionals in the U.S. proud of a minority label
Employers in America, including government agencies, colleges, hospitals, technology companies and large corporations, hire Indians to show their commitment towards meeting minority and diversity goals, including for senior management roles.
The term “minority” in this context is not a statistical measure. It is applied to various groups who hold few or no positions of power in a given society.
But the employers ignore that, unlike Blacks and Hispanics, Indians do not qualify as minorities. Indian professionals in the U.S. are almost all from middle-or-upper class families, who were educated at good schools and colleges in India and the U.S. Also, except for descendants of Sikh farmers who migrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, none of them suffered any historical discrimination and economic hardships in America.
The original goal for including Asians among minorities was to help uplift the historically disadvantaged people from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other U.S. jurisdictions in Asia and the Pacific, descendants of nineteenth century Chinese railroad workers and Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War Two.
Indian professionals face rising criticism for taking jobs, from some minorities, White Americans as well as conservative and right-wing politicians.
In this environment, Indian professionals should tell their employers to exclude them from lists they compile to show their commitment to diversity hiring. This will ensure that the employers hire Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other minorities, who legitimately qualify.
Also, it is in the self-interest of Indian professionals to clearly establish that their hiring was based on merit. Otherwise, their professional achievements will be doubted for the rest of their career, even as they are burdened with the label of being hired to fill minority quotas. This experience would be similar to that of minorities who meet the intent of diversity hiring. There is an underlying and often unfounded assumption among some of the other employees that such minority hires do not possess the requisite qualifications and skills.
Most Indian professionals in America – from chief executives Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Anjali Sud at Vimeo and Sonia Syngal at Gap; Ajit Jain, vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway; Srikant Datar, dean of the Harvard Business School; Vanita Gupta, Associate U.S. Attorney General; and on down – deserve their success given their educational credentials, training and skills. So, it should be unsettling for them to be counted and represented as evidence of ethnically diverse “minority” hiring.
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