A valuable blueprint for techies and others in a culture-change state of mind.
Microsoft CEO Nadella describes the empathetic leadership he hopes will spark a renaissance at the software giant in “the coming era of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence.”
Three years ago, when he succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the author found the once-dominant software company was “sick” and its employees “disheartened” after a period of stalled growth. The world, once PC–centric, had given rise to mobile and cloud technologies, and Microsoft lagged behind others. In this thoughtful debut, the Indian-born Nadella tells the story of his personal life and his work as a change-making leader, and he explains the coming importance of machine intelligence. The author emerges as a modest, likable individual from an accomplished family; his mother, a Sanskrit scholar, taught him the importance of balance, and his economist father the value of intellect. Arriving in the United States just before the 1990s tech boom, he earned a computer science degree at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a master’s degree at the University of Chicago; he joined Microsoft in 1992. He writes with candor about his challenges as CEO: “hierarchy and pecking order” reigned at the fiefdom-ridden company, stifling spontaneity and creativity. His response has been to listen with empathy to employee concerns and to help build and curate a new, open culture that empowers staffers to act on their passions and “make a real difference” in a “mobile-first, cloud-first world” in which 3 billion people will soon be connected to the internet, sensors, and the internet of things. To achieve that culture, the company “must exercise a growth mindset by being customer-obsessed, diverse, and inclusive and act as One Microsoft.” His book includes descriptions of experimental retreats, “hacks” meant to fire passions, and leadership principles and other tips.
A valuable blueprint for techies and others in a culture-change state of mind.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265250-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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