Satya Nadella’s corner office, on the fifth floor of Building 34 at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, features a can’t-miss 84-inch Surface touch-screen computer that dominates one wall. But what demands even more attention are the vast quantities of books in the room. They fill rows of shelves and are piled by the dozen on a long table next to Nadella’s desk.
The place looks more like a neighborhood bookshop than the command center for the third-most-valuable company on the planet. “I read a few pages here or a few pages there,” Nadella says, in his typically understated manner. “There are a few books, of course, that you read end-to-end. But without books I can’t live.”
He is sitting in a turquoise armchair, with multicolored socks peeking above his casual brown shoes. The stacks around him include heady tomes such as Bionomics and How Will Capitalism End?, but his taste is eclectic. At one point during our conversation he references a Virginia Woolf essay about illness; at another, Trinidadian author C.L.R. James’s literary take on cricket. When explaining the impact of Microsoft‘s Cortana AI assistant, Nadella eschews market-share data for Shakespeare: “If Othello had Cortana, would he have recognized Iago for who he was?”
One of Nadella’s first acts after becoming CEO, in February 2014, was to ask the company’s top executives to read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, a treatise on empathic collaboration. The gesture signaled that Nadella planned to run the company differently from his well-known predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and address Microsoft’s long-standing reputation as a hive of intense corporate infighting. (Programmer/cartoonist Manu Cornet crisply summed up the Microsoft culture in a 2011 org chart spoof that depicted the various operating groups pointing handguns at each other.) The reading assignment “was the first clear indication that Satya was going to focus on transforming not just the business strategy but the culture as well,” says Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith, a 24-year company veteran.
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