'Hit Refresh'
Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols, HarperBusiness, 288 pages, $29.99. The day he introduced himself to his Microsoft co-workers as their new CEO, Satya Nadella knew he faced a skeptical audience. Employees were demoralized. Internal polls showed they were unhappy with the direction of the company after a decade of lost ground to the likes of Apple and Google. And they didn't believe Nadella, or any of the other insiders in the running to replace the retiring Steve Ballmer, could fix things. Nadella felt the company needed a renaissance, and his efforts to do just that are documented in "Hit Refresh," a book that is, by turns, a semiofficial history of Microsoft, memoir and rumination on the state of technology and society. Nadella shares some of his background growing up in India and how that influenced his business attitudes, but mostly the book is about his time at the company. Nadella prodded employees to be humble, curious and inquisitive and to break down corporate silos. Microsoft had to become a risk taker, he writes. Nadella writes that he was met with some resistance when, as an up-and-coming executive, he tried to change the direction of Microsoft's Server & Tools unit, an effort that would sow the seeds for Microsoft's cloud-computing revival. Later, as he built a new executive team, some longtime executives were sent packing. He is cautious in his storytelling but does delve into some of the decisionmaking, including buying Minecraft and repairing the company's relationship with Samsung.
