In one passage of his new book, Hit Refresh, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tells the story of his response to a “disheartening” finding from an internal survey that sought to gauge the company’s cultural transformation.
He explains that employees were largely happy with the company’s direction and newfound sense of internal collaboration and purpose. But one category was a major exception.
“When asked whether their vice president, or group leader, was prioritizing talent movement and development, the results were worse than they’d been before our culture-building project began,” he writes, in part. “I had set a clear mission and envisioned an empowering culture. Employees and senior leaders were on board, but we had a missing link — middle management.”
He recalls an anonymous Microsoft manager who came to him “to share how much he loved the new growth mindset and how much he wanted to see more of it, pointing out, ‘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. This is not what we had in mind.”
At a meeting of Microsoft’s top 150 executives, Nadella tried to get everyone back on course. “To be a leader in this company,” he told them, “your job is to find the rose petals in the field of shit.”
“Perhaps not my best line of poetry,” he concedes in the book, “but I wanted these people to stop seeing all the things that are hard and start seeing things that are great and helping others see them too. Constraints are real and will always be with us, but leaders are the champions of overcoming constraints.”
All of this is true, according to multiple people inside the company. But it turns out there’s more to the story than Nadella let on.
Nadella made the original “rose petals” comment at a quarterly executive staff briefing. At the next annual executive retreat, at the Suncadia Resort in Washington state, everyone got a rose along with a personal note from Nadella, in a nod to his infamous remark.
We’re told that Panos Panay, the head of the Microsoft Surface business, joked that he wondered if he had won “The Bachelor” when he saw his rose in his room.
Speaking of notes from the CEO, Microsoft employees have all been getting a special copy of the book, with annotations by Nadella and a message inside. Here’s what it looks like.
PREVIOUSLY: Review: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s candid book ‘Hit Refresh’ goes inside the tech giant’s revival
