Satya Nadella is widely believed to be one of the most successful tech CEOs of all time — Microsoft has managed to regain its relevance under his leadership — and it was a long and thoughtful process through which he’d landed the CEO post.
In a candid recounting of Nadella’s journey to the top, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed the deliberate and strategic grooming that prepared Nadella for the role. Ballmer’s account offers a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes machinations that shaped Microsoft’s leadership transition. Nadella had succeeded Ballmer as Microsoft’s CEO in 2014.
“Satya is a very technical person,” Ballmer began, “and one of the things that was important to him, and to the company and the board, was we were able to get him a lot of different experiences, and he did well at all of them.”
“So we said, ‘Hey, you don’t really know anything about an area called general ledger and accounting, but why don’t you go run this thing called Dynamics?'” Ballmer described the rapid pace of Nadella’s development: “We moved him quite rapidly. We said, ‘We got to get this search thing together. This is the high-potential guy. This is a guy who can learn new things. He’s technically minded. Boom, throw him a new problem,’ and he’s building new skill sets along the way, machine learning, and others.”
“And so in that sense, he had all these experiences. He clearly had good people skills. He clearly had an affinity for product. He clearly had a knack for understanding how to think about, particularly, our enterprise selling operation.” Recognizing Nadella’s burgeoning leadership qualities, Ballmer continued, “I knew we needed to give him even more stuff. So we, actually me, Bill [Gates] agreed, our senior leadership team: this is a guy we should be thinking about for the future of the company.”
The culmination of this long-term strategy became evident during the CEO search. “And so when it came time to find my replacement,” Ballmer admitted, “I kind of knew upfront, we’ve been growing this guy for about 10, 15 years. This guy is really talented. So he gets the job.” Ballmer emphasized Nadella’s comprehensive understanding of the business: “Obviously, he had huge skills in many areas of the business, more than anybody else. He knew not only software companies, but he knew more of the breadth of this place than anybody.”
“He’s done an incredible job with the company,” Ballmer declared, highlighting Nadella’s impact on Microsoft’s cloud business: “If you look, we had a cloud business that… I’ll call it nascent, when I left. That thing didn’t *have* to succeed. It’s succeeded because Satya was able, with the team of course, but to give it what I’ll call the jet fuel that’s propelled him.”
Ballmer’s account shows the importance of strategic talent development and succession planning for large companies. Great CEOs aren’t created by accident — or picked at chance — often it can take over a decade of planning and training to make them truly world-class.