If you spend time with Satya Nadella—as I did on several occasions this year while researching our new cover story on the dramatic impact he’s had on Microsoft since being named CEO in February 2014–you quickly learn how much books matter to him. He reads them, recommends them, and turns to the lessons he’s learned from them again and again as he explains his approach to running one of the largest companies on the planet. As he put it to me: “Without books, I can’t live.”
Nadella, whose own first book, the memoir/vision for the future Hit Refresh, is being published in late September, says that he’s drawn particular inspiration from these seven works on history, economics, technology, and management strategy:
The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi: “My father recommended this book long ago,” says Nadella of the 1944 classic by a Hungarian-American writer who chronicles the development of England’s market economy and argues that society should drive economic change.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville: Elon Musk and Facebook AI chief Yann LeCun have praised this textbook on one of software’s most promising frontiers. After its publication, Microsoft signed up coauthor Bengio, a pioneer in machine learning, as an adviser.
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