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How Microsoft Overhauled Its Approach to Growth Mindset
- November 22, 2018
- Key Concepts: Growth Mindset Master Class , Leadership , Microsoft
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As we’ve been writing in our ongoing series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class , growth mindset is a topic that leaders across industries have gotten excited about. This week, we’d like to share a story of one of growth mindset’s biggest advocates: Microsoft.
Case In Point: Microsoft
As the foundational culture attribute at Microsoft, growth mindset has been a critical focus of the company’s culture transformation.
CEO Satya Nadella sparked the tech giant’s cultural refresh with a new emphasis on continuous learning four years ago. With his sponsorship, the talent team has since worked meticulously on enabling growth-oriented business priorities, employees’ behavioral habits, and organizational systems for its workforce of 131,000 employees worldwide. Digital transformation made clear that a state of perpetual learning would be necessary for employees at all levels.
In Nadella’s words, this strategic reorientation would require going from being a group of “know-it-alls” to a group of “learn-it-alls.”
Growth mindset in games, quizzes, and empathy museums
Inspired by Professor Carol Dweck, Nadella and Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft CHRO, along with the senior leadership team, determined that growth mindset would become the foundation of Microsoft’s desired-toward culture. A range of approaches have since been taken to initiate and drive efforts for long-term change, starting with engaging senior leaders to talk about and role model growth mindset, employee-awareness campaigns to drive growth mindset adoption, and ongoing measurement of how the employees experience growth mindset in the company.
For example, interactive online modules with rich storytelling and multimedia were created for employees to learn about growth mindset . Conversation guides were built for managers to enable meaningful exchanges about what growth mindset behaviors look like in team settings. Leaders also engage in storytelling to give examples for growth mindset behaviors.
Successes with demonstrated growth mindset behaviors are celebrated as reinforcements of growth mindset habits in the workplace. Various employee engagement and training solutions like games, quizzes, lending libraries with curated books, mobile empathy museum, and environmental creative assets were developed to engage employees around growth mindset behaviors.
One of the most essential efforts was developing Microsoft leadership principles , in partnership with NLI, with the intent of engaging everyone in the company – from senior executives to new hires – in building growth mindset habits, processes, and environment into everyday culture experience at Microsoft.
Weaving growth mindset into the daily fabric
The talent team also operationalized growth mindset in processes and practices. Growth mindset principles have been embedded in learning, team development and performance management processes, and have expanded to talent review and succession planning practices .
For example, in addition to creating clarity on meaning of growth mindset, managers also are operationalizing growth mindset during business reviews, as well as through goal setting with their teams. Since Microsoft no longer has a system of ratings and rankings, the current performance and development process focuses on providing clarity around what employees are now being rewarded for: the demonstrated abilities to build on and to contribute to the success of others are now equally essential to attaining performance goals.
Last but certainly not least, Microsoft sees continuous measurement as invaluable to its culture change. Daily pulse surveys constantly collect metrics of employee experiences of growth mindset all together, more detailed items such levels of risk aversion, visibly recognizing and learning from failure, or support in unlocking one’s ability. Favorability of growth mindset experience measurement has been trending between 78% and 80%, and it has been proven as the primary driver of the rest of the Microsoft culture attributes of customer obsessed, diverse and inclusive, one Microsoft, and making a difference.
This article is the seventh installment in NLI’s new series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use.
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CASE STUDY: How Satya Nadella overhauled Microsoft's cutthroat culture and turned it into a trillion-dollar 'growth mindset' company
Lehtikuva, Markku Ulander/AP Photo; Yuri Gripas/Reuters; Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters; Ruobing Su/Business Insider
Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are the former CEOs.
- Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company thanks largely to a culture shift led by Satya Nadella.
- Since Nadella became CEO in 2014, he's encouraged the entire company to adopt a growth mindset, or the belief that skills are developed through hard work and challenges are opportunities to learn.
- Before Nadella took over, Microsoft was characterized by competition between teams and between individual employees.
- Now, in keeping with a growth mindset, Microsoft evaluates employees' performance based partly on how much they helped their colleagues succeed. The company also looks to learn from its former rivals in the tech industry.
- Business Insider spoke with a range of company insiders and organizational researchers to get the inside story on how to change the culture of a 150,000+ employee software giant.
- Microsoft is a case study in how a growth-mindset culture can help companies succeed in the future economy.
- Click here for more BI Prime content.
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A cartoonist once drew an illustration depicting Microsoft's organizational chart as warring factions.
Take a look and you'll see three separate gangs: one blue, one green, one yellow. The gangs are assembled in pyramid-shaped hierarchies, with one leader at the top, two or three deputies at the next level, and so on.
A hand sticks out from each pyramid, pointing a gun directly at one of the others. It's clear. This is war.
And then Satya Nadella became CEO.
Nadella described the era of warring gangs in his 2017 memoir-manifesto, " Hit Refresh :" "Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind."
That particular cartoon - drawn in 2011 by a Google employee named Manu Cornet , no less - made changing Microsoft's culture Nadella's No. 1 goal as CEO.
"As a 24-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me. But what upset me more was that our own people just accepted it," Nadella wrote. "When I was named Microsoft's third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company's culture would be my highest priority."
Since becoming CEO, Nadella has been credited with a grand reinvention of Microsoft, exemplified by its market value exceeding $1 trillion, one of just a handful in history to hit that mark. When Nadella first took over, its market value was around $300 billion. The company has shifted from a has-been to a cloud powerhouse.
One of the keys to this transformation is a psychological concept that's become a mantra at Nadella's Microsoft: growth mindset .
Microsoft has traded a fixed mindset for a growth mindset
Growth mindset describes the belief that skills are developed through hard work and that challenges are opportunities to learn. Fixed mindset, on the other hand, refers to the belief that talent is innate and that struggling is a sign of failure. Research on the difference between growth and fixed mindset - and how they predict success - was pioneered by Stanford's Carol Dweck.
Early on in her career as a developmental psychologist, Dweck visited children at school and presented them with a series of increasingly difficult puzzles. Her goal was to better understand how people cope with failure. Some students, she found, weren't fazed by it.
In her 2006 book, " Mindset ," she recalls one 10-year-old boy who "pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, 'I love a challenge!'"
Dweck would spend the next five decades trying to figure out the difference between people who relish a good challenge and those who fear failure. Scores of studies published under her name suggest that people who see intelligence and abilities as learnable are more successful, personally and professionally, than people who think they're static.
Recently, Dweck coauthored a study that drew a link between growth mindset and organizational success . Employees who think their companies have a fixed mindset, the study found, interpret the company's culture as less collaborative, less ethical, and less willing to take risks than employees who think their companies have a growth mindset.
Given the rapid pace of technological change , these research findings are hyper-relevant. Across industries, adopting a growth mindset may be the only way to survive, and certainly the only way to thrive. When neither executives nor rank-and-file employees can predict what their jobs will look like next week, they need to embrace the resulting vulnerability, and get excited about learning.
Plenty of companies, in industries from telecommunications to early education, talk about cultivating a growth mindset , and about looking for job candidates who have it . But Microsoft is perhaps the most powerful example of an organization that has used growth mindset, and the psychology behind it, to rebuild its culture.
In many ways, fixed mindset and growth mindset can describe Microsoft before and after Nadella.
Nadella has encouraged Microsoft employees to be 'learn-it-alls' instead of 'know-it-alls'
Gates' successor, Steve Ballmer, also known for an explosive temper, later presided over the atmosphere depicted in that cartoon Nadella was determined to address. Ballmer was known for cultivating a culture in which Microsoft teams warred with each other, as previously reported by Business Insider .
Nadella, who joined Microsoft as an engineer in 1992, came up in this culture, before becoming CEO in early 2014.
By that point, the company's bid to compete in the smartphone market through the purchase of Nokia was proving to be a burden and would lead it to write off nearly the entire $7.6 billion acquisition price. The personal computer market was shrinking, leading to declines in Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system business, and the Xbox One console's poorly received launch made it a punchline.
Microsoft's history as a tech-industry pioneer wouldn't help the company compete, Nadella wrote in an email to employees on his first day as CEO. The company needed a change in mindset.
"Our industry does not respect tradition - it only respects innovation," Nadella wrote on Feb. 4, 2014, in a memo to employees days after taking on the CEO role. "Every one of us needs to do our best work, lead and help drive cultural change. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us forward. We must change this."
Nadella's leadership philosophy evolved into the adoption of a growth mindset. He asked employees to be "learn-it-alls," not "know-it-alls," and promoted collaboration inside and outside the organization. Employees are now evaluated partly on how much they've helped others on their team.
Microsoft introduced a new performance-management framework based on growth mindset
With any company culture shift, executives run the risk of promoting jargon more than action, and of HR representatives being the only ones who know there's a culture change underway.
Microsoft has tried to avoid that fate, not only by training its employees on the psychology of growth mindset, but also by embedding the concept into its daily work flow.
Prompts to adopt a growth mindset appear on posters throughout Microsoft's campuses ( something at which employees sometimes poke fun ). At the start of a meeting, a manager might remind colleagues to approach an issue with a growth mindset.
And in one of the most significant manifestations of growth mindset, Microsoft has eliminated stack ranking .
Stack ranking was famously used by Jack Welch when he was CEO of General Electric. Ballmer used the system at Microsoft to evaluate employees, although he did start phasing it out prior to his departure. Microsoft managers had to rank their employees from one to five in equal measure. Which meant that, no matter how good the employees were, some of them had to get the lowest ranking of a five.
Performance was defined in stack ranking as the quality of individual work, and that emphasis on individual performance was linked to fierce competition among Microsoft employees. It was also a barrier to Microsoft's innovation, since it facilitated a culture that rewarded a few standout team members and even gave employees incentive to hope their colleagues failed.
Microsoft leadership says its new system for evaluating employees instead rewards collaboration. Managers and employees meet often to discuss performance , in keeping with the general trend of companies nixing annual reviews and having managers regularly speak with employees about their work.
"What we really value is three dimensions," said Hogan , Microsoft's chief people officer. "One is your own individual impact, the second is how you contributed to others and others' success, and the third is how you leveraged the work of others."
To use Hogan's examples, maybe a more seasoned employee helped someone new to the team, or a software engineer built on another engineer's work instead of reinventing it.
Microsoft recently applied growth mindset to a new framework for managers : model, coach, care. That's a combination of setting a positive example for employees, helping the team adapt and learn, and investing in people's professional growth.
To measure the impact of these initiatives in real time, Microsoft emails employees with a different question every day asking how they're feeling about the company and its culture.
The shift from competition to collaboration might seem like it would be a breath of fresh air. And on the whole, it has been. But employees say it's presented its own challenges, too.
Nadella pushes Microsoft executives to take on stretch assignments
Adopting a growth mindset can be uncomfortable, he said.
"Growth mindset is a euphemism because it can feel pretty painful, like a jump into the abyss," he said. "You need to be able and willing to confront your own fixed mindset - the things that make you believe something can't work. It's painful to go through personally, but when you get past it, it's tremendously rewarding."
The transition has been edifying, both in terms of his personal growth - Lee was recently named to the National Academy of Medicine - and Microsoft's growth in the industry, as it establishes itself as a meaningful player in healthcare tech.
Microsoft now sees the business case for letting go of its rivalries with other tech giants
Under Ballmer, Microsoft was notorious for prioritizing its Windows operating system and Office productivity applications businesses over the rest of the company - at one point, it even canceled the Courier tablet, which would have been an early, future-looking competitor to Apple's iPad, because it may have undermined Windows.
Likewise, Microsoft once shunned Linux, a free open-source operating system once considered the biggest threat to Windows. Ballmer once called it a "cancer." But early on in Nadella's time as CEO, Microsoft changed tack and proclaimed, " Microsoft loves Linux ."
It wasn't just Microsoft being friendly. There was a strong business case for blurring boundaries. At the time, Microsoft said it realized its customers used both Windows and Linux, and saw providing support to both as a business opportunity on-premise and in the cloud. That would have been unthinkable in the Ballmer years, but it's proven to be a savvy business move: Microsoft recently hinted that Linux is more popular on its Azure cloud platform than Windows itself.
Microsoft's relationship with Salesforce has followed a similar trajectory. Whereas Ballmer had frequent and public bouts with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff , Microsoft under Nadella put aside its rivalry with Salesforce - which competes directly with Microsoft's customer-relationship-management Dynamics 365 product - in order to ink a big cloud deal that was good for the company overall.
Nadella even invites leaders from companies across industries to Microsoft's CEO Summit so the executives can learn from each other. Ballmer, meanwhile, famously snatched an employee's iPhone at a company meeting and pretended to stomp on it.
Which is not to say Microsoft always plays nice in the Nadella era. The company last summer changed licensing agreements to raise prices - often significantly - when customers choose to run certain Microsoft software on rival clouds including Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. And it's been trading public barbs with AWS over the still contested $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract.
The Trump administration awarded the contract to Microsoft over AWS, but Amazon is challenging the decision in court, alleging political interference. In February, a judge ruled that Microsoft must stop working on the contract.
The culture shift at Microsoft is an ongoing process
The beginning of Microsoft's culture shift was rocky.
In "Hit Refresh," Nadella recalls a Microsoft manager who announced in the early days, "Hey, Satya, I know these five people who don't have a growth mindset." Nadella writes, "The guy was just using growth mindset to find a new way to complain about others. That is not what we had in mind."
Even today, Microsoft leaders acknowledge that the culture change isn't over . Things have improved under Nadella, but the company culture is still far from perfect.
Diversity is an opportunity for improvement at Microsoft. Much like the larger technology industry , Microsoft still employs relatively few women and people of color in leadership and technical roles.
One of Nadella's biggest gaffes as CEO happened early on in his tenure, when he suggested women should not ask for raises, but rely on "faith" and "karma." After these comments, Nadella sent out an internal memo admitting to his mistake, explaining how he planned to learn from it, and stating his belief in "equal pay for equal work."
Nadella writes in "Hit Refresh" that in some ways he's glad to have belly-flopped in public. "It helped me confront an unconscious bias I didn't know I had," Nadella writes, "and it helped me find a new sense of empathy for the great women in my life and at my company."
Kevin Oakes, who runs a human-resources research company that helped Microsoft with its shift toward growth mindset, sees Nadella as an exemplar of a leader during a transition. That's largely because Nadella practices the growth mindset he preaches. In a presentation at Talent Connect, an annual conference organized by LinkedIn (which is owned by Microsoft), Oakes said Nadella has been Microsoft's "culture champion." Nadella understands that organizational culture is critical to the company's performance, Oakes said.
But today's Microsoft is still far from perfect. The positive contributions of growth mindset have not yet matched up with diversity and equity for Microsoft's workforce, according to some employees. Microsoft is the subject of a gender discrimination lawsuit still pending , which was denied class-action status by a federal judge. Employees have also openly alleged sexual harassment and discrimination.
The company released its first diversity and inclusion report in 2019 to track its progress in hiring - and retaining - a more diverse workforce. Results from that report showed that minorities in Microsoft's US offices earned $1.006 for every $1 white employees earned. A closer look reveals that white men still held more high-paying leadership positions than women or underrepresented minorities.
Meanwhile, Microsoft leadership still has some philosophical differences with employees as it relates to employee activism. Employee groups have protested Microsoft and Microsoft-owned GitHub's relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and more recently, some employees have said Microsoft's relationship with oil and gas companies is at odds with the company's goal to become "carbon negative" by 2030.
Microsoft has been equally vocal about diversity and inclusion within its customer base, building products that are accessible to as many users as possible. Ben Tamblyn, a 15-year company veteran and Microsoft's director of inclusive design, mentioned Xbox as a prime example. In 2018, Tamblyn helped oversee the release of the Xbox Adaptive Controller , which makes it easier for gamers who have limited mobility or physical impairments to play. (Interviews with Neal and Tamblyn were arranged by Microsoft's public-relations firm.)
Microsoft is a case study in growth mindset
Microsoft's culture shift, and its accompanying business turnaround, is already a case study in business schools and in reports from management consultancies and research centers . That makes sense to Mary Murphy, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University and Dweck's co-author on the paper about growth mindsets within organizations.
Growth mindset is essential for innovation in the technology industry, Murphy said, where change rarely happens incrementally. Instead, there are big inflection points from which there's no return. Microsoft, Murphy added, needs to be on the "cutting edge" of growth mindset in order to stay relevant.
Nadella, for his part, has modeled a growth mindset from the top of the organization, not least in his response to his tone-deaf comments about gender and compensation. "I learned, and we will together use this learning to galvanize the company for positive change," Nadella wrote in the memo he sent apologizing for the comments. "We will make Microsoft an even better place to work and do great things."
Got a tip? Contact reporters Shana Lebowitz via email at [email protected] and Ashley Stewart via email at [email protected] , message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242 .
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Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset
By: Herminia Ibarra, Aneeta Rattan, Anna Johnston
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a…
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- Publication Date: Jun 1, 2018
- Discipline: Organizational Behavior
- Product #: LBS128-PDF-ENG
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When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give Nadella some ideas for Microsoft. He adapted the idea to encourage employees to shift from Microsoft's historical "know-it-all" culture to embrace a "learn-it-all" curiosity. The case study provides background on Nadella's challenges and context, as well as how he and his leadership team executed their culture change effort.
Learning Objectives
Show a leader's thought process on the need for culture change, with particular focus on the vision for change as a reflection of the life experiences of the leader.
Detail the execution levers that Nadella and his team identified and used during the change process.
Introduce the concept of organisational culture, focusing on the process of culture change and the role of leaders and their teams in reinforcing or transforming culture.
Introduce the idea of "mindsets," focusing on how they affect behaviour and reflect organisational culture, and what leaders can do to inculcate a growth mindset as a means of making cultural change and enhancing organisational performance.
Jun 1, 2018
Discipline:
Organizational Behavior
London Business School
LBS128-PDF-ENG
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How Microsoft became an Intelligence Driven Organization – and how your business could do the same
Leentje Chavatte
Microsoft, Data & AI and Digital Transformation
Microsoft has learned how to make digital transformation work, not just from projects undertaken with customers, but also by committing to its own transformation journey.
Digital transformation may be a buzzword, but that doesn’t make it meaningless. Far from it – a journey of transformation can open up infinite possibilities for organizations of any size and in any sector.
In recent years, Microsoft has supported large-scale transformations across many industries, delivering real, measurable results.
Robotics giant ABB saw a 20% increase in customer satisfaction after Microsoft’s Azure AI products helped transform its workforce management solution. Rockwell Automation achieved $300,000 in savings every day after transitioning to Office 365. A chatbot Microsoft created for UPS engaged in over 200,000 customer conversations in its first eight months alone.
These are some examples of the outcomes that can be realized when data is leveraged with Artificial Intelligence (AI). But digital transformation is not about isolated achievements. It is about recalibrating the entire organization around collecting, analyzing and using data. It is about becoming an organization with the ability to learn and evolve.
It’s not a one-time fix, it’s a journey. And it’s one Microsoft has been on itself.
Making it happen at Microsoft
Over four decades, Microsoft has grown from a small start-up to a $110 billion business with more than 130,000 employees. As the 4th Industrial Revolution hit, Microsoft felt the need for its own digital transformation to be at the forefront of the digital age.
The company set out to become a truly Intelligence Driven Organization with data at its heart. But to transform on such a massive scale, everyone from the CEO down had to align behind a vision that could inspire real change. It meant committing to new ways of working that would transform every process on which Microsoft was built. The whole business would need to work differently, experimenting more and learning from failure.
The transformation was a strategic imperative from the beginning. Looking back, you can follow the journey Microsoft was taking through CEO Satya Nadella’s public announcements. In April 2014, Satya said: “You have to build deeply into the fabric of the company a culture that thrives on data.” From that point on, everyone at Microsoft embraced a way of working that was centered around leveraging data to better understand and make decisions.
In 2017, Satya wrote the book Hit Refresh, covering the transformation at Microsoft within the context of AI and its impact on everyday life – a story encapsulated in his statement that “AI is the runtime that is going to shape all of what we do going forward.”
One year later, he introduced the idea of Tech Intensity, explaining that, “every organization will need to have what I describe as tech intensity…to be a fast adopter of digital technology…to build their own proprietary digital capability .”
A growth mindset
At the heart of Microsoft’s transformational journey was the concept of a growth mindset: the idea that everyone can change, learn and grow. To bring this vision to life, Microsoft identified four attributes that would allow this mindset to flourish.
The first attribute was obsessing over the people who matter most – the customers – and really understanding what truly matters to them. Second, Microsoft wanted to become a more diverse and inclusive organization. Third, the company wanted to break down its siloes and start operation as a single unit. And finally: to make a difference to the lives of each other, customers and the world around them.
As Satya pointed out, “as a culture, we are moving from a group of people who know it all to a group of people who want to learn it all .”
To track the progress of their cultural transformation, Microsoft began by asking employees if they were seeing evidence of positive change. This data was then evaluated against attributes that were measured over time. They included quantitative and qualitative analytics, with regular focus groups to ensure the trends that emerged were fully understood. To drive openness and transparency, all findings were regularly shared with senior management.
Becoming intelligence driven
Microsoft’s digital transformation offering is delivered by Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). With a long list of global clients from Toyota to the UN Refuge Agency, MCS applies enterprise technology to business problems by understanding goals, identifying risks, and guiding digital transformation.
It helps organizations unlock powerful insights, empower teams with organizational agility, and enhance security for a competitive edge. And it offers support at every step – helping businesses make the best use of the Microsoft ecosystem.
In short, MCS helps its customers become Intelligence Driven Organizations . That is, an organization that leverages data combined with AI-technologies to foster growth, innovation, speed to market and cost efficiency.
It’s an approach to digital transformation that is shaped not only by Microsoft’s own story, but also by years of conversations with business leaders the world over undertaking their own transformations.
Together, these influences led directly to the development of the Intelligence Driven Organization (IDO) model.
The IDO model
The IDO model is not a tech solution, or an offer. It’s MCS’ approach to helping organizations navigate their own transformations.
The IDO model helps organizations identify their ‘north star’ – that is, the set of business outcomes they wish to achieve and where they want to go in the future.
Then, it provides a roadmap that allows organizations to design the processes that will generate these outcomes – and build the capabilities to digitalize those processes so that they can be implemented, monitored, measured and continuously improved over time, creating digital feedback loops.
Digital feedback loops
Digital feedback loops can be seen as flows of information that emerge when a business process has been redesigned around data. That process could be an interaction with customers (e.g. website use, sales enquiries or product purchases). It could concern back-office operations. It could involve employee activity (e.g. intranet use or response to a survey) or it could involve the real-time usage of products (e.g. application crash data transmitted back to the software developer). The data is collected and used to optimize that process by AI-enabled applications. Crucially, all information can be surfaced to the business processes that need it. There are no data silos.
Digital feedback loops are a central component to becoming an Intelligence Driven Organization – creating a foundation that fuels positive change, enabling organizations to be more productive at scale and become increasingly customer centric.
The four axes of the IDO model
The IDO model provides a framework for organizations to make digital feedback loops a reality. It distills everything Microsoft has learned globally about how to approach digital transformation and breaks it down into four key axes.
The first involves development of an executive strategy that will see an intelligence driven culture take root. The second axis ensures the right technical capabilities are in place, creating a foundation for the journey ahead. It concerns the capabilities that will be needed, along with where they should be developed and when. Third comes a look at the day-to-day execution of the transformation, before the fourth and final stage – this is where the organization must envision and prioritize a set of scenarios that represent the desired business outcomes.
Framing an approach to transformation through the four axes helps organizations overcome the key obstacles to becoming intelligence driven that are often highlighted in research . These include availability of data, a shortage of data science skills, a difficulty envisioning the right business use cases and, most importantly, a culture that struggles to understand the need to be data driven.
The right way to rebound
In April 2020, Satya Nadella said:
“we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months.”
Now a new normal is emerging in the way people travel, work and shop. Organizations must respond quickly, becoming more efficient, more agile and more adaptable.
The principles behind Microsoft’s digital transformation can form the basis of similar projects in any organization. By becoming a business driven by data and AI – one that learns and evolves – companies can build the resilience they need to face the challenges of the future.
Microsoft Consulting Services can help business leaders use this moment as a trigger to transform, repositioning their organizations for a more competitive age. In the future, change will come even faster. To thrive, everyone must adapt.
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Grow your business with a growth mindset
What is a growth mindset.
In life, perspective is everything. The way we think and perceive ourselves determines who we are, who we become, and how well we excel. This kind of perception is called a mindset. A mindset is a perspective, an outlook, and a way of thinking. It determines if we will succeed or if we will fail. It influences how we do things, the risks we take, and what we accomplish. It can be good or bad and guides the direction and the amount of success we have in life.
A growth mindset is positive and forward-thinking. It embraces every misstep as a learning opportunity, not as a failure. It is an open-minded perspective that encourages improvement, which leads to success. It is an open-ended perspective that isn’t constrained by boundaries. It never assumes that people are limited by a level of intelligence or lack of ability.
The Growth mindset definition is a theory created by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck as a method to change and improve outcomes in education and student performance. Dweck’s book Mindset, The New Psychology of Success revolutionized the way educators viewed intelligence and overall student achievement. It challenges the belief that smart people were just born that way. Her work defies the idea that smarts and abilities are static and pre-determined. Instead, her theory proposes that intelligence and skills are developed and nurtured over time, given the right environment and encouragement. Dweck suggests that everyone can grow and achieve their full potential if they have positive, growth-oriented thinking.
- A growth mindset inspires. It is the power to believe in yourself and grow through perseverance. In other words, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to with the right kind of effort.
- Possibilities are limitless because you are not constrained by a pre-determined definition of talent or intellect. Failure is not a stopgap but an opportunity to learn and improve.
What is a fixed mindset?
A fixed mindset is limited, static, and unchanging.
- It thrives on the phrases, “I can’t, or I just don’t have what it takes.”
- It is filled with limitations, self-doubt, and fear of failure.
- It is the belief that talent, brainpower, and abilities are pre-determined, and everyone has faults that can’t be improved.
This viewpoint restricts the possibilities and outcomes of both the successful and the yet-to-be successful. It stops business in its tracks. A fixed mindset asserts that a person is limited by the number of talents he/she possessed from the start and that people can’t get smarter no matter how hard they try.
Fixed mindset versus growth mindset
A fixed mindset limits personal outcomes by plunging people into a sea of self-doubt. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that curtails business growth and should never fester anywhere in a business. The 1930s children’s book, The Little Engine That Could , teaches readers that anything can be accomplished with an optimistic attitude and determination. This concept is reinforced with the little train chugging up a mountain saying – I think I can, I think I can – I know I can! The story is still used today and rates in the top 100 by the National Education Association. Its overriding messages is that obstacles can be overcome if you believe in yourself and keep trying.
A growth mindset does the same thing – only better. In business, it encourages employee improvement and doesn’t pigeon-hole people with preconceived notions of what they can or can’t do. Unlike a fixed mindset, this positivity encourages novelty, which is key to success in business today. A growth perspective empowers employees by clearly defining an objective, business goals, and letting team members run with the challenge.
How a growth mindset drives business
What does it mean to have a growth mindset for business? It’s all about perspective and right-minded leadership that empowers possibilities and business outcomes. It motivates business owners and employees to aspire higher. The famous animator and entertainment mogul Walt Disney summed it up best years ago when he said, ‘if you can dream it, you can do it.’
Growth leadership encourages employees to expand their reach and go above and beyond the possibilities with no fear of failure. They will be inspired to try new things and take measurable risks because they are no longer obsessed with perfection. A growth mindset:
- Encourages creativity and innovation
- Focuses on outcomes not stumbling blocks
- Builds a team environment with a unified goal
- Makes workers more committed and determined
- Increases team enthusiasm
- Stops the fear of failure
- Eliminates the pitfalls of perfection seekers
- Encourages team ownership
- Inspires workers
Research conducted by Microsoft has proven that employees with a growth mindset are far more likely to go after more innovative projects and outcomes. It also encourages collaboration among teams which is the catalyst that drives business success.
Ways to gain a growth mindset in business
How does a business embrace this positive potential? It starts with a strong management style, growth-oriented thinking at the top, and the right people. Dweck recommends getting past the credentials when hiring a team. It isn’t all about the initials next to someone’s name. It’s about the individual and his or her attitude. Businesses need to:
- Hire people who embrace challenges and like to collaborate
- Attract people who want to improve
- Encourage positivity
- Lead by example with flexibility at the top
- Not punish failure
- Encourage team development which increases positive outcomes and innovation
- Look at the big picture – be forward-thinking
Adopting this small business mindset takes time. It’s not an exact science. After all, you are dealing with human beings who have unpredictable variables like emotions. Just remember, the likelihood of harnessing a positive mindset is better when it comes from the top down and is practiced daily throughout the organization.
Nurture innovation and the individual. Encourage risk-taking, and you can power all the possibilities. When you change to a positive mindset, you reset your business clock to Ready, Set, Grow!
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Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset
Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset ^ LBS128
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Publication Date: June 01, 2018
Source: London Business School
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give Nadella some ideas for Microsoft. He adapted the idea to encourage employees to shift from Microsoft's historical "know-it-all" culture to embrace a "learn-it-all" curiosity. The case study provides background on Nadella's challenges and context, as well as how he and his leadership team executed their culture change effort.
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Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a growth mindset
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Develop a growth mindset
In this module, you'll learn to distinguish between two mindsets: a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. When you adopt a growth mindset, you set yourself up for success and are able to take on new challenges.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Distinguish between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.
- Describe why a growth mindset is necessary for learning and working in technology.
- Apply methods to cultivate a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.
- Describe how to help support a growth mindset in others.
Prerequisites
- To get the best learning experience from this module, you should have an open mind and a willingness to learn about the expectations and responsibilities of mentorship in a technology workspace.
- Introduction min
- What are fixed and growth mindsets? min
- Exercise - Reflect on your mindset min
- Differentiate between fixed and growth mindsets min
- Exercise - Practice identifying fixed and growth mindsets min
- Strategies to change your mindset to a growth mindset min
- Exercise - Change your mindset from fixed to growth min
- Reflect on the connection between mindset and outcomes min
- Knowledge check min
- Summary min
Product details
- This case has been featured on our website, click to view the article .
Satya Nadella employed a 'growth mindset' to overhaul Microsoft's cutthroat culture and turn it into a trillion-dollar company — here's how he did it
- Microsoft is a case study in how a growth-mindset culture can help companies succeed in the future economy.
- Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company thanks largely to a culture shift led by Satya Nadella.
- Since Nadella became CEO in 2014, he's encouraged the entire company to adopt a growth mindset, or the belief that skills are developed through hard work and challenges are opportunities to learn.
- Before Nadella took over, Microsoft was characterized by competition between teams and between individual employees.
- Now, in keeping with a growth mindset, Microsoft evaluates employees' performance based partly on how much they helped their colleagues succeed. The company also looks to learn from its former rivals in the tech industry.
- Business Insider spoke with a range of company insiders and organizational researchers to get the inside story on how to change the culture of a 150,000+ employee software giant.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .
Sign up here to receive updates on all things Innovation Inc.
A cartoonist once drew an illustration depicting Microsoft's organizational chart as warring factions.
Take a look and you'll see three separate gangs: one blue, one green, one yellow. The gangs are assembled in pyramid-shaped hierarchies, with one leader at the top, two or three deputies at the next level, and so on.
A hand sticks out from each pyramid, pointing a gun directly at one of the others. It's clear. This is war.
And then Satya Nadella became CEO.
Nadella described the era of warring gangs in his 2017 memoir-manifesto, " Hit Refresh :" "Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy. Teamwork was being replaced by internal politics. We were falling behind."
That particular cartoon – drawn in 2011 by a Google employee named Manu Cornet , no less – made changing Microsoft's culture Nadella's No. 1 goal as CEO.
"As a 24-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me. But what upset me more was that our own people just accepted it," Nadella wrote. "When I was named Microsoft's third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company's culture would be my highest priority."
Since becoming CEO, Nadella has been credited with a grand reinvention of Microsoft, exemplified by its market value exceeding $1 trillion, one of just a handful in history to hit that mark. When Nadella first took over, its market value was around $300 billion.
One of the keys to this transformation is a psychological concept that's become a mantra at Nadella's Microsoft: growth mindset . The concept has helped Microsoft made the shift to remote work with aplomb, reaching a market cap of more than $1.6 trillion, showing that Nadella's strategy has survived the pandemic intact.
Microsoft has traded a fixed mindset for a growth mindset
Growth mindset describes the belief that skills are developed through hard work and that challenges are opportunities to learn. Fixed mindset, on the other hand, refers to the belief that talent is innate and that struggling is a sign of failure. Research on the difference between growth and fixed mindset — and how they predict success — was pioneered by Stanford's Carol Dweck.
Early on in her career as a developmental psychologist, Dweck visited children at school and presented them with a series of increasingly difficult puzzles. Her goal was to better understand how people cope with failure. Some students, she found, weren't fazed by it.
In her 2006 book, " Mindset ," she recalls one 10-year-old boy who "pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, 'I love a challenge!'"
Dweck would spend the next five decades trying to figure out the difference between people who relish a good challenge and those who fear failure. Scores of studies published under her name suggest that people who see intelligence and abilities as learnable are more successful, personally and professionally, than people who think they're static.
Recently, Dweck coauthored a study that drew a link between growth mindset and organizational success . Employees who think their companies have a fixed mindset, the study found, interpret the company's culture as less collaborative, less ethical, and less willing to take risks than employees who think their companies have a growth mindset.
Given the rapid pace of technological change , these research findings are hyper-relevant. Across industries, adopting a growth mindset may be the only way to survive, and certainly the only way to thrive. When neither executives nor rank-and-file employees can predict what their jobs will look like next week, they need to embrace the resulting vulnerability, and get excited about learning.
Plenty of companies, in industries from telecommunications to early education, talk about cultivating a growth mindset , and about looking for job candidates who have it . But Microsoft is perhaps the most powerful example of an organization that has used growth mindset, and the psychology behind it, to rebuild its culture.
In many ways, fixed mindset and growth mindset can describe Microsoft before and after Nadella.
Nadella has encouraged Microsoft employees to be 'learn-it-alls' instead of 'know-it-alls'
Since the era of Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and first CEO, its leadership had generally rewarded the smartest person in the room. And Microsoft performed well under Gates, but that performance came at a cost.
Gates was famous for meltdowns and browbeating – so much so that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen once described working with Gates as "being in hell." Gates would only back down if you could convince him you knew what you were talking about, Allen said.
Gates' successor, Steve Ballmer, also known for an explosive temper, later presided over the atmosphere depicted in that cartoon Nadella was determined to address. Ballmer was known for cultivating a culture in which Microsoft teams warred with each other, as previously reported by Business Insider .
Nadella, who joined Microsoft as an engineer in 1992, came up in this culture, before becoming CEO in early 2014.
By that point, the company's bid to compete in the smartphone market through the purchase of Nokia was proving to be a burden and would lead it to write off nearly the entire $7.6 billion acquisition price. The personal computer market was shrinking, leading to declines in Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system business, and the Xbox One console's poorly received launch made it a punchline.
Microsoft's history as a tech-industry pioneer wouldn't help the company compete, Nadella wrote in an email to employees on his first day as CEO. The company needed a change in mindset.
"Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation," Nadella wrote on Feb. 4, 2014, in a memo to employees days after taking on the CEO role. "Every one of us needs to do our best work, lead and help drive cultural change. We sometimes underestimate what we each can do to make things happen and overestimate what others need to do to move us forward. We must change this."
Nadella's leadership philosophy evolved into the adoption of a growth mindset. He asked employees to be "learn-it-alls," not "know-it-alls," and promoted collaboration inside and outside the organization. Employees are now evaluated partly on how much they've helped others on their team.
Microsoft introduced a new performance-management framework based on growth mindset
With any company culture shift, executives run the risk of promoting jargon more than action, and of HR representatives being the only ones who know there's a culture change underway.
Microsoft has tried to avoid that fate, not only by training its employees on the psychology of growth mindset, but also by embedding the concept into its daily work flow.
Prompts to adopt a growth mindset appear on posters throughout Microsoft's campuses ( something at which employees sometimes poke fun ). At the start of a meeting, a manager might remind colleagues to approach an issue with a growth mindset.
And in one of the most significant manifestations of growth mindset, Microsoft has eliminated stack ranking .
Stack ranking was famously used by Jack Welch when he was CEO of General Electric. Ballmer used the system at Microsoft to evaluate employees, although he did start phasing it out prior to his departure. Microsoft managers had to rank their employees from one to five in equal measure. Which meant that, no matter how good the employees were, some of them had to get the lowest ranking of a five.
Performance was defined in stack ranking as the quality of individual work, and that emphasis on individual performance was linked to fierce competition among Microsoft employees. It was also a barrier to Microsoft's innovation, since it facilitated a culture that rewarded a few standout team members and even gave employees incentive to hope their colleagues failed.
"We had a little bit of a 'not-invented-here' syndrome," Microsoft Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan previously told Business Insider , referring to the tendency for developers and even organizations to reject acceptable solutions to problems if they hadn't developed those solutions themselves.
Dweck's research helps explain this trend, too. Her studies suggest that stack ranking's emphasis on "star" employees can leave everyone else afraid to try anything new, for fear of failing. In turn, that means companies are less innovative.
Microsoft leadership says its new system for evaluating employees instead rewards collaboration. Managers and employees meet often to discuss performance , in keeping with the general trend of companies nixing annual reviews and having managers regularly speak with employees about their work.
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"What we really value is three dimensions," said Hogan , Microsoft's chief people officer. "One is your own individual impact, the second is how you contributed to others and others' success, and the third is how you leveraged the work of others."
To use Hogan's examples, maybe a more seasoned employee helped someone new to the team, or a software engineer built on another engineer's work instead of reinventing it.
Microsoft recently applied growth mindset to a new framework for managers : model, coach, care. That's a combination of setting a positive example for employees, helping the team adapt and learn, and investing in people's professional growth.
To measure the impact of these initiatives in real time, Microsoft emails employees with a different question every day asking how they're feeling about the company and its culture.
The shift from competition to collaboration might seem like it would be a breath of fresh air. And on the whole, it has been. But employees say it's presented its own challenges, too.
Nadella pushes Microsoft executives to take on stretch assignments
Nadella asked Peter Lee , one of the company's top researchers, to make a big change.
It was 2017 and Lee – now corporate vice president of Microsoft healthcare – had long worked on broader technology problems as a key leader in Microsoft Research, the company's research division.
Nadella wanted him to take on a new challenge and lead the company's emerging health care business, using his background in artificial intelligence and cloud computing to find new ways to tune the products to the needs of healthcare companies.
"Taking on healthcare was something that really perplexed me at first," he said. "I joked Satya sent me out into the Pacific Ocean and said, 'Go find land.'"
Adopting a growth mindset can be uncomfortable, he said.
"Growth mindset is a euphemism because it can feel pretty painful, like a jump into the abyss," he said. "You need to be able and willing to confront your own fixed mindset – the things that make you believe something can't work. It's painful to go through personally, but when you get past it, it's tremendously rewarding."
The transition has been edifying, both in terms of his personal growth – Lee was recently named to the National Academy of Medicine – and Microsoft's growth in the industry, as it establishes itself as a meaningful player in healthcare tech.
Microsoft now sees the business case for letting go of its rivalries with other tech giants
Under Ballmer, Microsoft was notorious for prioritizing its Windows operating system and Office productivity applications businesses over the rest of the company – at one point, it even canceled the Courier tablet, which would have been an early, future-looking competitor to Apple's iPad, because it may have undermined Windows.
Likewise, Microsoft once shunned Linux, a free open-source operating system once considered the biggest threat to Windows. Ballmer once called it a "cancer." But early on in Nadella's time as CEO, Microsoft changed tack and proclaimed, " Microsoft loves Linux ."
It wasn't just Microsoft being friendly. There was a strong business case for blurring boundaries. At the time, Microsoft said it realized its customers used both Windows and Linux, and saw providing support to both as a business opportunity on-premise and in the cloud. That would have been unthinkable in the Ballmer years, but it's proven to be a savvy business move: Microsoft recently hinted that Linux is more popular on its Azure cloud platform than Windows itself.
Microsoft's relationship with Salesforce has followed a similar trajectory. Whereas Ballmer had frequent and public bouts with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff , Microsoft under Nadella put aside its rivalry with Salesforce – which competes directly with Microsoft's customer-relationship-management Dynamics 365 product – in order to ink a big cloud deal that was good for the company overall.
Nadella even invites leaders from companies across industries to Microsoft's CEO Summit so the executives can learn from each other. Ballmer, meanwhile, famously snatched an employee's iPhone at a company meeting and pretended to stomp on it.
Which is not to say Microsoft always plays nice in the Nadella era. The company last summer changed licensing agreements to raise prices — often significantly — when customers choose to run certain Microsoft software on rival clouds including Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. And it's been trading public barbs with AWS over the still contested $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract.
The Trump administration awarded the contract to Microsoft over AWS, but Amazon is challenging the decision in court, alleging political interference. The Pentagon in September upheld its decision to award the contract to Microsoft but AWS is expected to file a new complaint as part of the lawsuit next week.
The culture shift at Microsoft is an ongoing process
The beginning of Microsoft's culture shift was rocky.
In "Hit Refresh," Nadella recalls a Microsoft manager who announced in the early days, "Hey, Satya, I know these five people who don't have a growth mindset." Nadella writes, "The guy was just using growth mindset to find a new way to complain about others. That is not what we had in mind."
Even today, Microsoft leaders acknowledge that the culture change isn't over . Things have improved under Nadella, but the company culture is still far from perfect.
Diversity is an opportunity for improvement at Microsoft. Much like the larger technology industry , Microsoft still employs relatively few women and people of color in leadership and technical roles.
One of Nadella's biggest gaffes as CEO happened early on in his tenure, when he suggested women should not ask for raises, but rely on "faith" and "karma." After these comments, Nadella sent out an internal memo admitting to his mistake, explaining how he planned to learn from it, and stating his belief in "equal pay for equal work."
Nadella writes in "Hit Refresh" that in some ways he's glad to have belly-flopped in public. "It helped me confront an unconscious bias I didn't know I had," Nadella writes, "and it helped me find a new sense of empathy for the great women in my life and at my company."
Kevin Oakes, who runs a human-resources research company that helped Microsoft with its shift toward growth mindset, sees Nadella as an exemplar of a leader during a transition. That's largely because Nadella practices the growth mindset he preaches. In a presentation at Talent Connect, an annual conference organized by LinkedIn (which is owned by Microsoft), Oakes said Nadella has been Microsoft's "culture champion." Nadella understands that organizational culture is critical to the company's performance, Oakes said.
But today's Microsoft is still far from perfect. The positive contributions of growth mindset have not yet matched up with diversity and equity for Microsoft's workforce, according to some employees. Microsoft is the subject of a gender discrimination lawsuit still pending , which was denied class-action status by a federal judge. Employees have also openly alleged sexual harassment and discrimination.
The company released its first diversity and inclusion report in 2019 to track its progress in hiring — and retaining — a more diverse workforce. Results from that report showed that minorities in Microsoft's US offices earned $1.006 for every $1 white employees earned. A closer look reveals that white men still held more high-paying leadership positions than women or underrepresented minorities.
Microsoft has since announced plans to double the number of Black leaders and employees within the company, and the number of Black suppliers with which it works.
Meanwhile, Microsoft leadership still has some philosophical differences with employees as it relates to employee activism. Employee groups have protested Microsoft and Microsoft-owned GitHub's relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and some employees have said Microsoft's relationship with oil and gas companies is at odds with the company's goal to become "carbon negative" by 2030.
Some Microsoft employees say the company is making progress. Rich Neal, a senior director who's been with the company since 2003, recalled a recent meeting in which a male colleague all but repeated the same comment a female colleague had shared 15 minutes earlier.
At that point, Neal recalled, a third meeting participant addressed the male colleague to ask whether perhaps he hadn't understood the female colleague's point. And Neal said it wasn't a passive-aggressive attack. Senior leaders are encouraged to "be curious and ask questions, versus making statements," as a way of modeling growth mindset, he added.
Microsoft has been equally vocal about diversity and inclusion within its customer base, building products that are accessible to as many users as possible. Ben Tamblyn, a 15-year company veteran and Microsoft's director of inclusive design, mentioned Xbox as a prime example. In 2018, Microsoft released the Xbox Adaptive Controller , which makes it easier for gamers who have limited mobility or physical impairments to play. (Interviews with Neal and Tamblyn were arranged by Microsoft's public-relations firm.)
Microsoft is a case study in growth mindset
Microsoft's culture shift, and its accompanying business turnaround, is already a case study in business schools and in reports from management consultancies and research centers . That makes sense to Mary Murphy, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University and Dweck's co-author on the paper about growth mindsets within organizations.
Growth mindset is essential for innovation in the technology industry, Murphy said, where change rarely happens incrementally. Instead, there are big inflection points from which there's no return. Microsoft, Murphy added, needs to be on the "cutting edge" of growth mindset in order to stay relevant.
Nadella, for his part, has modeled a growth mindset from the top of the organization, not least in his response to his tone-deaf comments about gender and compensation. "I learned, and we will together use this learning to galvanize the company for positive change," Nadella wrote in the memo he sent apologizing for the comments. "We will make Microsoft an even better place to work and do great things."
Got a tip? Contact reporters Shana Lebowitz via email at [email protected] and Ashley Stewart via email at [email protected] , message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242 .
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Ducoing Human Capital
Microsoft Growth Mindset Transformation Case Study (NLI)
NeuroLeadership Institute consultants Chris Weller and Andrea Derler adapt their original research white paper, “Growth Mindset Culture” and explore a case study between NLI and Microsoft showcasing Microsoft’s ongoing journey of improvement, offering creative uses for growth mindset in an organization, and proving that no company is too large to focus on growth.
NLI - Microsoft Growth Mindset Transformation Case Study
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IOE - Faculty of Education and Society
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- Teacher Education College
How to critically evaluate educational research: The growth mindset case
08 May 2024, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm
Join this event to hear Ilya Zrudlo illustrate four complementary ways in which teachers and teacher educators can critically evaluate the results of educational research.
This event is free.
Event Information
Availability.
Ilya will propose four critical angles
- reviewing available empirical studies, especially through the lens of insights drawn from statistics;
- carefully considering the context of educational research;
- analysing the way in which research constructs may be embedded in or influenced by idiosyncratic features of culture;
- paying attention to conceptual integrity and (re)turning to ordinary language.
Ilya will critically evaluate the research on ‘growth mindset’ interventions to illustrate these four complementary angles.
This online event will be particularly useful for teachers, researchers and policymakers interested in teacher education and the role philosophy can play in teacher education.
To book your place, please email Yuxin Su, [email protected] .
PESGB seminar series
This event is part of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) seminar series. PESGB is a learned society that promotes the study, teaching and application of philosophy of education. Its London Branch hosts seminars every Wednesday in conjunction with the Centre for Philosophy of Education . These seminars are led by national and international scholars in the field, covering a wide range of issues of educational and philosophical concern.
All are welcome to attend.
Related links
- Department of Education, Practice and Society
- Centre for Philosophy of Education
About the Speaker
Ilya zrudlo.
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada
He has two main research programmes. The first investigates the moral and intellectual capacities young people need to acquire in order to contribute to the development of their communities, particularly in urban contexts in North America.
The second research programme focuses on teaching and teacher education, exploring the nature of teaching itself, the role of philosophy in teacher education, and how philosophical analyses of popular educational slogans and interventions can protect teachers from the ongoing torrent of fads and fashions in the field.
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Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset (Spanish language)
By herminia ibarra , aneeta rattan.
- Organisational Behaviour
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give Nadella some ideas for Microsoft. He adapted the idea to encourage employees to shift from Microsoft’s historical “know-it-all” culture to embrace a “learn-it-all” curiosity. The case study provides background on Nadella’s challenges and context, as well as how he and his leadership team executed their culture change effort.
Learning objectives
- Show a leader’s thought process on the need for culture change, with particular focus on the vision for change as a reflection of the life experiences of the leader.
- Detail the execution levers that Nadella and his team identified and used during the change process.
- Introduce the concept of organisational culture, focusing on the process of culture change and the role of leaders and their teams in reinforcing or transforming culture.
- Introduce the idea of “mindsets,” focusing on how they affect behaviour and reflect organisational culture, and what leaders can do to inculcate a growth mindset as a means of making cultural change and enhancing organisational performance.
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Tours and Activities Ads passport to performance for GetYourGuide
Booking unforgettable travel experiences
Travel is most satisfying when you set off with an open mind. As the online travel marketplace, GetYourGuide, has quickly discovered, the same applies when it comes to pushing the boundaries of what paid search can do for your growth strategy.
GetYourGuide helps travellers to discover and book unforgettable travel experiences—and connects experience providers in different locations with an audience that’s inspired and ready to book. When Microsoft Advertising announced the launch of Tours and Activities Ads, a feed-based format displaying images and key selling points within search results pages, the company spotted a new opportunity for delivering such inspiration.
We can see how effective this format is at differentiating GetYourGuide from the ten or so blue links that appear on the results page. We’re able to communicate much more of the feel of the experience and what we can provide. When we’re promoting a food tour in Berlin, it’s no longer just a headline that we’re showing people—it’s a picture of a today's traveller trying local street food in a hip and well-known area of the city (maybe a döner!). We can test how these different images resonate with audiences. There’s just so much more we can experiment with.
— David McNair, Senior Paid Search Marketing Manager, GetYourGuide
Richer search experiences at the right moment
“It was a really easy decision to add Tours and Activities Ads to our portfolio—because it’s an opportunity for our marketing team to take ownership of feeds, experiment, and roll out new things,” says GetYourGuide’s Senior Paid Search Marketing Manager, David McNair. “Whenever someone is looking to book an unforgettable experience, we need to make sure that we’re the first one in front of them, with the right creative at the right time. We want to test everything when it comes to doing that—and we always strive to be one step ahead of new products on the platform side. Search is becoming much more image-based and using these kinds of richer formats is a muscle we want to train.”
David joined GetYourGuide with a mission to help ensure travellers can find unforgettable travel experiences through paid search channels. His brief is to grow the contribution of Microsoft Advertising’s revenue contribution while consistently hitting targets for return on advertising spend (ROAS). That puts real value on opportunities to differentiate GetYourGuide’s experiences from the other attractions in search results—and that’s exactly what Tours and Activities Ads provide.
“We can see how effective this format is at differentiating GetYourGuide from the ten or so blue links that appear on the results page,” says David. “We’re able to communicate much more of the feel of the experience and what we can provide. When we’re promoting a food tour in Berlin, it’s no longer just a headline that we’re showing people—it’s a picture of a today's traveller trying local street food in a hip and well-known area of the city (maybe a döner!). We can test how these different images resonate with audiences. There’s just so much more we can experiment with.”
Delivering travel experiences within results pages has had an immediate impact on traffic volumes and revenue generated. It’s an impact that’s been growing further as David and his team continue to test and experiment.
Discovering the sweet spot for ROAS
“The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away,” says David. “We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we’re getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS. One of the important things that we learned early on was taking advantage of all the fields available within Tours and Activities Ads—like free cancellation and activity duration. Getting all of those ticked off and included in the ads really helped.”
Tours and Activities Ads don’t just enable David to provide more inspiration and information to searchers. They also provide him with more conversions at a lower cost. The ad format uncovered entirely new traffic for GetYourGuide, as 98% of clicks and 96% of conversions brought in by Tours and Activities Ads came from pages that didn’t have any text ads on them. On top of that, the cost per click (CPC) was 25% lower than text ads. And Tours and Activities Ads also had a halo effect for the standard text ads that were served alongside, boosting clickthrough rate (CTR) by 3x.
“Not so long ago, we were limited to testing variations in the description line of a text ad,” he says. “But there’s just so much more you can do with these richer formats. There are a lot more ways to get our brand involved in the search experience.”
The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away. We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we’re getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS. One of the important things that we learned early on was taking advantage of all the fields available within Tours and Activities Ads—like free cancellation and activity duration. Getting all of those ticked off and included in the ads really helped.
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IMAGES
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COMMENTS
Case In Point: Microsoft. As the foundational culture attribute at Microsoft, growth mindset has been a critical focus of the company's culture transformation. CEO Satya Nadella sparked the tech giant's cultural refresh with a new emphasis on continuous learning four years ago. With his sponsorship, the talent team has since worked ...
Microsoft is a case study in how a growth-mindset culture can help companies succeed in the future economy. Click here for more BI Prime content. ... Microsoft is a case study in growth mindset.
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give Nadella some ideas for Microsoft. He adapted the idea to encourage ...
How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders. by. Carol Dweck. and. Kathleen Hogan. October 07, 2016. Save. Research shows that managers see far more leadership potential in their ...
PRESENTING: Satya Nadella employed a 'growth mindset' to overhaul Microsoft's cutthroat culture and turn it into a trillion-dollar company — here's how he did it. Business Insider. Mar 7, 2020 ...
A growth mindset. At the heart of Microsoft's transformational journey was the concept of a growth mindset: the idea that everyone can change, learn and grow. To bring this vision to life, Microsoft identified four attributes that would allow this mindset to flourish.
A mindset is a perspective, an outlook, and a way of thinking. It determines if we will succeed or if we will fail. It influences how we do things, the risks we take, and what we accomplish. It can be good or bad and guides the direction and the amount of success we have in life. A growth mindset is positive and forward-thinking.
Receiving this award shows that our intuition was right - it confirms the value that the concept of the growth mindset, and its effective application at Microsoft, can have for the business world.". Reasons for popularity. Herminia said: "I think the case has been so popular for four reasons.
The concept of continued learning at Microsoft has become synonymous with having a growth mindset. A term coined by American psychologist Carol Dweck in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, "growth mindset" was adopted by Microsoft when Satya Nadella took the helm as CEO in 2014 and has become a cultural pillar for the ...
Product Description. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give ...
Microsoft's public AI experiment "failed by its own standards". It was a "humiliation," the press scorched. Undeterred, Nadella wrote to Tay's creators, "Keep pushing, and know that I am with you.". In December 2016, Microsoft launched Zo, a bot similar to Tay, but designed to be more "troll-resistant.".
Learning objectives. By the end of this module, you'll be able to: Distinguish between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. Describe why a growth mindset is necessary for learning and working in technology. Apply methods to cultivate a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. Describe how to help support a growth mindset in others.
2016. Organisational Behaviour. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it ...
CASE SUMMARY Satya Nadella takes over as Microsoft's 3. rd. CEO Inherits an organization with a debilitating cultural landscape Invites Kathleen Hogan as a partner in driving a cultural transformation across 130,000+ employees Inculcates Growth mindset as the cultural lever Together, along with other small and large change
Abstract. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the Microsoft he inherited was fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year, Nadella's wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give ...
London Business School Review 2018 Vol 29:3 p 50-53. Authors / Editors. Ibarra H;Rattan A. Biographies. Herminia Ibarra Aneeta Rattan. Publication Year. 2018. Abstract. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in February 2014, the company seemed in danger of fading into irrelevance.
Purpose, culture change and communication. "Don't be a know-it-all. Be a learn-it-all.". This great quote by Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft nicely sums up how they embraced the growth ...
Microsoft is a case study in how a growth-mindset culture can help companies succeed in the future economy. Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company thanks largely to a culture shift led by Satya ...
2016. Abstract. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it might give Nadella ...
NeuroLeadership Institute consultants Chris Weller and Andrea Derler adapt their original research white paper, "Growth Mindset Culture" and explore a case study between NLI and Microsoft showcasing Microsoft's ongoing journey of improvement, offering creative uses for growth mindset in an organization, and proving that no company is too large to focus on growth.
Ilya will critically evaluate the research on 'growth mindset' interventions to illustrate these four complementary angles. This online event will be particularly useful for teachers, researchers and policymakers interested in teacher education and the role philosophy can play in teacher education.
2016. Organisational Behaviour. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, suspecting it ...
Case studies; Insights; Marketing with Purpose; Webcasts; Learn. Certifications; Free consultation; ... Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today > Microsoft Advertising blog. Show filters. Filter By. Cancel Apply filters. ... How Microsoft Retail Media (powered by PromoteIQ) helps retailers and advertisers comply ...
The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away. We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we're getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS.