Tag: Satya Nadella

As the world anticipates a new US Congress and a new administration, we need a strategy to reimagine and rebuild communities, industries, companies, and nations. As we battle cascading disruptions from a global pandemic, economic strain, climate-related crises, and unrest over racial injustice, technology should be part of a solution—but technology alone is not enough.

To more evenly spread economic opportunity and resilience, we must democratize “tech intensity,” a combination of tech and people skills—including among citizen developers. This so-called intensity is made up of three dimensions: the adoption of technology, the capability of individuals to use it, and their trust in the organizations deploying it. Tools from cloud computing to AI should be in the hands of every knowledge worker, first-line worker, organization, and public-sector agency around the world.

Today’s farmer flies a low-cost drone over agricultural fields, sending data back to the farmhouse, where the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge can provide instant analysis on where lack of moisture or insects are creating hot spots. The factory floor operator now increasingly relies on next-generation skills to discern the drift of a drill bit to ensure precision manufacturing. Doctors, regardless of where they are located, convene virtually using augmented reality to examine a patient and share images and instantly receive insights from the data.

The next decade of economic performance for every organization will be defined by the speed of its digital transformation, with tech and skills together creating competitive advantages. As such, tech intensity, like electricity, will fade into the background, becoming part and parcel of society.

Research conducted by Microsoft and Keystone points to the critical role of investment not just in tech but in creating an architecture that can enable anyone to access opportunity across divides and barriers, developing the capabilities required to drive the innovation desperately needed to rebuild.

Success in this moment of unprecedented turbulence will require us to think boldly and move beyond traditional approaches. The current crisis demands innovation across both public and private sectors, and across every geographic and social community. This calls not only for developing individual skills, but also for providing an architecture to ensure that the necessary tools, data, and technology are broadly accessible and made available across traditionally isolated groups and geographies. The importance of technology and innovation is hardly a new idea. But it is people’s widespread and intense use of tech and tools that is the crucial ingredient.

For the past several years, the business and technology industries have spoken of empowering citizen developers, defined somewhat narrowly as legions of individuals who are empowered to drive innovation from data, technology, and tools that are easy to create and deploy. These citizen developers don’t replace professional software developers, but rather augment them and build on top of their innovations. Citizen developers are crucial because the potential of data and software-based innovation is enormous in any organization.

Citizen developers amplify the impact of professional software developers, and vice versa. Professional developers built Excel and Visual Studio, but workers of every kind were trained to build on top of these innovations. Overall productivity improved as a result. In today’s cloud era, we again need both. Relying only on traditional technology development resources will never be enough to realize the countless opportunities that exist.

Conducted across more than 130 leading companies, our research shows that those with a more integrated technological and human resource architecture enjoyed more widespread innovation and outperformed the others, in industries as different as manufacturing, health care, retail, and financial services. In fact, companies with high tech intensity have doubled the growth rate on average of those with low tech intensity. In essence, those winning companies broke down traditional barriers, innovated more, and grew faster.

The impact of this approach could scale far beyond the private sector. Dartmouth economist Diego Comin and economist Bart Hobijn developed the Cross-Country Historical Adoption of Technology data set, examining the time frame over which 161 countries adopted 104 different technologies, from steam power to PCs. Based on this analysis, Comin argues that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies. But equally important, he says, is the intensity they used to put those new technologies to work. Even countries that were slow to adopt new technologies could catch up if their people had access to them and were taught to use them to solve the problems they were closest to. Are the technologies just sitting there, or are they available and easy to use for a trained workforce to get the most productivity out of them? The difference is tech intensity.

An email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees: 

Seeing injustice in the world calls us all to take action, as individuals and as a company. Sometimes this action is personal – what do I do to change? Sometimes it is organizational – what changes do I need to make around me? And sometimes it is reflected into the world – what can we do as a company to accelerate the change we desire? As we see the everyday racism, bias and violence experienced by the Black and African American community, the tragic and horrific murders of so many, the violence in cities across the US, it is time for us to act in all arenas. As I shared in our Employee Town Hall last week, each of us – starting with me and the senior leaders at the company – has a role to play. We cannot episodically wake up when a new tragedy occurs. A systemic problem requires a holistic response.  

I am heartbroken by the deep pain our communities are feeling. The results of systemic racism, which have impacted opportunities and exacerbated injustices for Black and African American communities, urge me to consider my own role as a leader. I must continue my journey of understanding and empathy and examine actions I take, or don’t take, every day. Listening and learning from my Black and African American colleagues is helping me develop a better understanding of their experience. And I take accountability for my own continued learning on the realities of privilege, inequity and race and modeling the behavior I want to see in the world.  

As a company, we need to look inside, examine our organization, and do better. For us to have the permission to ask the world to change, we must change first. We have to embrace the same speed and mindset that we do in anticipating and building for future technological shifts. Each day, we work to bridge the gap between the culture we espouse and our daily lived experience, but we must do more and do it faster. In order to be successful as a business in empowering everyone on the planet, we need to reflect the world we serve. This is our commitment; we have goals and programs to improve representation in all roles and at all levels. We’re investing in the talent pipeline broadly, as we’ve expanded our connections with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We also have to create an environment where all voices are heard and valued, that’s why inclusion is a core priority for each one of us. I ask each of us to recommit to our shared D&I priority, participate in our inclusion learning programs, use the tools and resources we have shared on becoming an effective ally for others. We have the capabilities to make Microsoft more diverse and inclusive, but we must do the work.  

We also have a responsibility to use our platform and resources intentionally to address systemic inequities in our communities and in society broadly. This is the work we need to do to have lasting impact. For example, we’re using our technology and our voice toward a more equitable criminal justice system with our Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. We created our Supplier Diversity program 15 years ago, so our supplier companies better reflected the diversity of our customers. Today, it makes up nearly 10 percent of our supplier spend. That spend has an amplifying effect, growing the local economies in the communities where those businesses are located. We need to keep building on this work in every community we operate in.   

Finally, we must carry our company values out into the world in a way that reflects our strengths and expertise. To this end, we will deepen our engagement with six organizations that are advancing social justice, helping community organizers address racial inequality, and offering solidarity to the Black community: Black Lives Matter Foundation, Equal Justice Initiative, Innocence Project, The Leadership Conference, Minnesota Freedom Fund, and NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund. This starts with a company donation of $250,000 to each of these organizations ($1.5 million in total), followed by a company match of our employees’ contributions to eligible organizations. Together, through your giving and the company match, we have donated more than $15 million to civil rights, social action, and advocacy nonprofit organizations since 2015.

I have heard from many employees over the past several days, expressing calls for action, calls for reflection, calls for change. My response to all of you is this: Yes. We have to act. And our actions must reflect the values of our company and be directly informed by the needs of the Black and African American community. We must continue to nurture the energy and passion that the Blacks at Microsoft employee resource group fueled in all of us since its founding in 1989. We have been on a cultural transformation journey and must accelerate our pace of change. Each of us, starting with me, must look at where we are as individuals, confront our fixed mindset and act. Our humanity is what calls out to us to make the world a better place. 

We all have a role to play. I will do the work. The company will do the work. I am asking each of you to do the work. And together, we will help make the difference we want to see in the world. 

 Satya 

This article is a part of a series in which the Financial Times asks leading commentators and policymakers what to expect from a post-Covid-19 future

The writer is chief executive of Microsoft

Society’s deepest concerns are rooted right now in two connected questions: how do we protect public health and how can we promote an economic recovery that is inclusive? A third question is becoming more important because intensive use of technology has become so central to the other two: how do we preserve the privacy and cyber security needed for trustworthy computing? The past two months have seen digitisation progression that would ordinarily take two years generated by the demands of remote working and the need for accurate data and intelligence.

Neither the public nor the private sector alone can provide the answers. The challenges we face demand an unprecedented alliance between business and government. Too often we celebrate the ideal of a maverick working alone in a garage solving all our hard problems. We do need those mavericks, but we also need more co-ordinated combinations of government and industry that respond and innovate. That’s true for this pandemic and it is true for global warming, homelessness and other pressing concerns.

As a software platform and tools company, we at Microsoft view ourselves as digital first responders when the true first responders call from the front lines. Microsoft works for the heroes who are putting their lives at risk and must bring them everything we have to offer.

Here’s what I mean. In healthcare, data is an indispensable tool for decision-making. We’re working at every level of government to help standardise data, provide it for healthcare workers and to support scientific efforts to discover treatments and vaccines.

Working remotely is a new reality. The sheer number of appointments and meetings taking place on our Teams platform means greater productivity and access to greater volumes of intelligence. We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7bn meeting minutes in one day, up 200 per cent from 900m on March 16, when falling securities markets shook the world. The UK’s National Health Service, the Cleveland Clinic and others are using our platform for virtual visits, consultations between isolated patients and their families and, sadly, end of life video calls. New doctors are taking the Hippocratic oath using Flipgrid, our video sharing tool.

Telemedicine is skyrocketing. A health network in Pennsylvania uses our video conferencing platform to communicate with patients most vulnerable to Covid-19. Seattle hospitals are using our tools to manage bed counts and inventory of critical supplies and share information with others in the region. And the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used our services to build a health bot that quickly assesses the symptoms and risk factors for people asking about infection.

Technology is accelerating the search for a vaccine and treatments. We are helping to create an open, machine-readable data set of all scientific literature on Covid-19. We have expanded our partnership with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the immune system’s response to coronavirus, and will make the data set freely accessible to speed the development of treatments. And scientists are using GitHub, our developer platform, to power a distributed computing project that uses volunteers’ personal computers to assist researchers developing potential therapeutics.

Looking ahead, economic recovery must be inclusive, allowing every country, industry and citizen to prosper. Cloud-based products and services are keeping businesses, governments and non-profits functioning, and helping small businesses serve their customers and compete. Broadband is needed everywhere to support vulnerable populations.

Education and skills development must be a centrepiece of our efforts to recover. Schools and universities around the world are turning to tech platforms for remote learning. The University of Bologna recently moved 90 per cent of courses for 80,000 students online within three days. Not bad for a 900-year-old institution. A Japanese elementary school hosted its graduation on Minecraft, building a virtual assembly hall and seating to maintain the sense of community and belonging so important in times like this.

Finally, trust and security are more important than ever. We must all prioritise the protection of healthcare systems from cyber attacks. In addition, more kids are online than ever, so Microsoft is doubling down on digital safety. We’re committed to protecting privacy and building ethical artificial intelligence.

Accurate information and resources are always essential, especially during a global pandemic. LinkedIn Learning and Bing are providing data and life-saving information. We’re working with Facebook, Google, Twitter and our customers to help elevate authoritative content and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus.

It is a societal failure when we undervalue institutions and the critical services they provide. What we need is citizens and customers to demand co-ordination and partnership across sectors.

What’s happening in Seattle, the first US city affected by the coronavirus outbreak, provides a glimpse. A public-private alliance of the region’s largest employers, Challenge Seattle, became the town square for sharing data and best practices, managing the crisis and planning our return to work. Partnerships between business, government non-profit and academia are essential to flattening the infection curve everywhere, and recovery will require an enduring, vigilant effort.