Satya Nadella Quotes

So in 2000, when we changed the business model and started really focusing on that triangle and putting the customer in the center, we decided we should hold off - we've done enough consolidation; we've got enough critical mass.

The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster, and continue to transform.

We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.

I try to build on our management philosophy. I try to understand what the threats and opportunities are for us. Uh, I try to make sure that we're driving innovation and creative destruction hard enough so we're not blindsided, and that our attitude is to, in starting any initiative, any business, is to focus on how we can create value for others, rather than how we maximize profit, because you can make money focusing on, "How do I maximize profit?"

I think if companies start reinventing themselves and focus on the customer experience more, they will win out in the end.

Management innovation is going to be the most enduring source of competitive advantage. There will be lots of rewards for firms in the vanguard.

Innovation is critical to the heartbeat of any successful corporation in the industrialized world.

To gain the competitive edge, companies must master the ability to innovate.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

What Sam Walton did was to go into one of the most mature industries of all and find a way to make it grow, grow, grow, double-digit, month after month, year after year. He did it by innovation, customer focus, and above all, speed.

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the product. When you read the press, people say, "Oh, the product needs improvement." I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" Because they can improve that product. That leaves more upside from an innovation and revenue potential than you're gonna find in a lot of places. So you could say that's a downside, I see that as an opportunity.

What characteristics are most important in creative workers? One quality you need is inventiveness. You need to be able to take whatever product or service you are providing and figure out ways of making it better, faster, cheaper. The other quality is empathy and insight into what people might want, even though they don't even know their wants, probably because there's no product or service to test their wants.

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

Having made up my mind, I went to see Steve [Jobs]. I brought a hand-drawn sketch with me, and I said, "Please make something like this." He said, "Don't show me such an ugly design sketch." But he also said, "You've got the right idea. I totally agree that the time has come when we can make the ultimate mobile machine."

The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities.

Market growth alone doesn't give you enough tailwind. You have to create your own. The way to do that is by designing products for consumers that wow them.

We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.

The time to go into a new business is when it’s badly run by others.

I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.

What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products... We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are.

When you innovate, the jobs can't go overseas because other countries haven't figured out how to do it yet.