tech·nic·al·ly agile

Why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs?

Discover why Satya Nadella exemplifies agile leadership better than Steve Jobs, as Martin Hinshelwood explores vision and teamwork in this insightful video.

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This is a great question, although I imagine I might pick up a bit of flack because of the hordes of people who love Steve Jobs  and think of him as one of the most iconic leaders of the past century.

Steve is great, but in terms of Agile leadership, he doesn’t touch sides – in my opinion – to Satya Nadella. You can see the difficulty he created within Apple  because all innovation, product development, and so forth stemmed from him rather than a culture of innovation that permeates throughout the organization.

So, a great product owner, absolutely, probably one of the best that has ever lived, but there are chinks in the leadership armour that are impossible to ignore.

Why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs?

Innovation and Agile capabilities.

The rise and fall of Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs was at Apple, they were awesome as an organization.

They invented some of the most amazing products and ecosystems imaginable. They led the way in terms of product design, and innovation of business models in industries such as music and film, and gave birth to the rise of application development within the Apple ecosystem.

The trouble is that the organization didn’t really have these capabilities, Steve Jobs did, and that didn’t permeate throughout the organization.

It needed him to crack the whip, articulate the vision, and drive outcomes.

Steve Jobs ruled Apple with an iron fist, and by all accounts, his treatment of people wasn’t great by today’s standards of leadership and mentorship. By some accounts, a toxic working environment that only the thickest skin could tolerate.

As soon as Steve Jobs passed away, Apple appears to have lost their innovation edge and although still an incredibly successful organization, it is a shadow of its former self under Steve’s leadership.

So, there was and is no systemic, in-built innovation and agile capabilities across the organization.

An organization that gained notoriety for disrupting almost every market it entered is now an organization that is at risk of significant disruption.

The rise and rise of Satya Nadella.

When Satya Nadella  took over the reins at Microsoft  , he immediately started to decentralize decision-making by pushing decision-making authority and capability down to the experts who were best positioned to make those calls.

In an organization the size of Microsoft, it takes a considerable amount of time to create change that has a lasting, sustainable impact but from the start, Satya was determined to embrace Agile and use those agile values and principles as a starting point for developing agile and innovation capabilities.

He wanted to see the people who are actively doing the work, and are experts in that field, have a far stronger role in deciding how best to create a complex solution or solve a complex problem.

It is something that people witnessed right across the organization.

Agile isn’t the only answer because not every part of the organization needs to innovate, some areas need to be great at execution and so you don’t have the same emphasis on product development and innovation in those areas, you simply need to follow best practices and get things done effectively for those areas to succeed.

But in the areas where product development and innovation is important, that new spirit of agility permeated the organization and began to transform how people think, collaborate, and create.

Each department bore responsibility for coming up with their own ideas, using their own data and feedback loops to develop new hypotheses, and for designing experiments to validate or invalidate those hypotheses.

In a word, empiricism or empirical process control.

Make things transparent and visible, inspect the work you are doing frequently, and use what you have learned combined with data to inform what you attempt next.

Measuring what matters.

Satya Nadella is also responsible for helping the organization focus on the metrics that truly matter and using those measures to influence the most valuable outcomes.

For example, the Azure folks used to incentivise sales revenue and so customers would purchase millions of hours of Azure but become deeply dissatisfied because they only used a fraction of those hours over the course of the year.

Incentivising the wrong things led to increased customer churn and decreased customer satisfaction.

The focus was on revenue extraction rather than value creation.

So, Microsoft flipped the script and started to incentivise sales folk based on the number of Azure hours used by clients, and this led to creative and innovative ideas for how clients could derive greater value by using the Azure environment more effectively.

Customers start to witness heaps of value being created in their environments, and Microsoft are the driving force behind the ideas that drive value creation as well as the facilitation of those new ideas and opportunities.

Increased customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty, and optimal usage of the Azure product suite. #winning.

These kinds of shifts in mindset and the organisation’s culture started to happen across the board. Satya is not only a super smart guy, but he is also an incredibly pragmatic and practical person too.

He comes from an engineering background and has actively built products so he deeply understands the product development environment, agile, and the power of having great people working on complex problems throughout the organization.

He understands that those people, working at the coalface, are the important people in the organization. They are the ones driving innovation and cocreating valuable products with customers.

It isn’t just Satya who embodies this agile leadership style, people like Richard Branson do too.

It’s that spirit of agility, that spirit of innovation, that pioneering spirit that inspires people throughout the organization to develop their own agile capabilities and to invest in mastering product development and innovation from a grassroots level.

So, that is why, in my opinion, Satya Nadella is a better example of Agile leadership than Steve Jobs.

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so why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs? that’s a great question. um so it’s going to be very contentious because of the number of people that really like Steve and Steve was great Steve Jobs was some fantastic for Apple but I think the difficulty that you see the difficulty that he created at Apple and you see it today and that’s that um when Steve was running Apple everything was awesome they were innovative creating new ideas but they weren’t really he was he he was driving those that innovation and those changes with with almost like an iron fist and the way treated people was was very very very bad from the measure of today right kind of toxic working environment um but he was an Apple that was successful he left Apple or he got ousted by the by the board I think it was then not successful they brought him back it was successful he died and then Apple started to lose their innovation edge so there was no sustained inbuilt innovation systemically across the organization it was all in that pyramid structure of command and control whereas when when when Satya Nadella took over Microsoft he started and it takes time in organizations of that scale and that history he started making changes to the organization to um effectively but again I know everybody says this right but responsibility down the organization so that the people doing the work have more say in how the work is done and you can see that across lots of lots of different parts of the business I mean the the the the the the windows team and the um Azure DevOps team are teams that I’ve worked with a little bit with the teams team um and they’re a lot more innovative it’s innovation across the board so everybody and all of the teams is responsible for coming up with ideas and uh trying to implement them and figuring out what the smallest thing they can change is but the real um the real the real push comes from the non-logical systemic changes that are starting to happen across the business so for for example they used to measure the Azure sales folks they would get bonus to based on the number of hours of Azure that they sold and what they found was they would have unhappy customers because customers would buy a million hours of Azure for the year because the salesperson was great and managed to sell them on it and all the cool things they would use it for and the ideas and all of those things and then at the end of the year they would get their bill for them for the million hours of Azure and realised that they’d only used 50,000 of those million hours but they still have to pay for them um so so so that’s a focus on as a business on revenue extraction versus value creation the customer didn’t get value from that transaction or a small amount of value compared to what they paid whereas a small change in the way you measure the sales folks and what they did was they changed the Salesforce bonuses from sale sales to usage so the sales folks now get their bonus based on the amount of Azure hours that their customers use which means the salesperson is now not the person who’s got the biggest gift of the passer to get clinched the sale and get the deal they’re the person who can long term engage with the customer and help them get better at using the thing you’re trying to sell so that they get more value from it so they would do things like I’ve done engagements where somebody in Microsoft sales has hired me to come in and talk to the customer about getting better at DevOps and the benefits they would get from it in order to increase the level of DevOps and adaption and change in in the customer because that sales person knew that that company’s operations team couldn’t keep up with the need for change therefore they would then have to utilise services in Azure therefore they would get more bonus right so the you’re turning the negative behaviour measure into a positive behaviour measure right the salesperson gets their bonus but the customer also gets the value and you’re starting to see that change in other parts of the business as well as they go through and figure out what does this actually mean to us what does this change in outlook change in attitude and part of this comes from it’s Satya is an incredibly pragmatic guy he’s uh he’s an engineer in background so he’s built products he understands the difficulty of being um building products and having those things imposed and he understands the power of the people that are in his organisation that they’re the ones that are important to the business they’re the ones that are driving it and it’s not just a Satya versus um uh Steve Jobs idea you can see it in the way Richard Branson approaches his his his companies he talks about his job is not to look after customers his job is to look after his employees their jobs to look after the customers he doesn’t have to worry about that because if they’re happy they’ll do that job and do it well um and there’s a huge switch at the moment from I feel like from um in leadership styles from this idea of stuff focused leadership to people focused leadership right instead of focusing on more stuff more money for the shareholders more money for uh uh them um more output of products they’re starting to focus on um how do we enable the people in our organisation to maximise the value that we deliver so that our customers trust us over the long term and and Simon Sinek talks about this a lot he talks about moving from the finite game to the infinite game if you’re playing a finite game you there’s a moment where um we all start count up score and find out who wins right that’s a finite game all of all of my board games are finite games they have a set of rules we all play by the same rules a point in time where we stop and find out who wins but the infinite game is how businesses run businesses run on the infinite game there’s no point in time where we all stop the whole world doesn’t stop we can’t have score and see who’s who’s who’s who’s won in that world it will continue on infinitely so that that’s that that that focus on people that focus on leadership that focus on the long-term vision of the company and the products is is is that long-term infinite focus and that for me is the big difference between um Steve Jobs and Satya Nadella and it’s actually the same difference between um um Balmer uh Steve Balmer previous CEO at Microsoft and Satya as well.

People and Process Agile Leadership Organisational Agility Pragmatic Thinking Business Agility Agile Project Management Agile Strategy Agile Transformation Technical Leadership Agile Philosophy
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