Microsoft Rewrites The Code

CEO Satya Nadella, once considered an unlikely choice to lead the tech behemoth, has stopped infighting, restored morale, and generated more than $250 billion in market value in less than four years. All it took was a little thought about what matters most.

- Harry McCracken

Satya Nadella’s corner office, on the fifth floor of building 34 at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, features a can’t-miss 84-inch touch-screen computer that dominates one wall. But what demands even more attention are the vast quantities of books in the room. They fill rows of shelves and are piled by the dozen on a long table next to Nadella’s desk.The place looks more like a neighborhood bookshop than the command center for the third-most-valuable company on the planet.

“I read a few pages here or a few pages there,” Nadella says, in his typically understated manner. He is sitting in a turquoise armchair, with multicolored socks showing above his casual brown shoes. The stacks around him include heady tomes such as Bionomics and How Will Capitalism End?, but his taste is eclectic. At one point during our conversation he references a Virginia Woolf essay about illness; at another, Trinidadian author C.L.R. James’s literary take on cricket. When explaining the impact of Microsoft’s Cortana AI assistant, Nadella eschews market-share data for Shakespeare: “If Othello had Cortana, would he have recognized Iago for who he was?”