Satya Nadella unveils Microsoft’s new mission: empowering everyone on the planet

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella today announced a new mission statement for the worldwide technology company.

“Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Nadella wrote in an email he sent to employees today. GeekWire obtained the email and published it in its entirety today. Microsoft representatives confirmed to VentureBeat that the email is authentic.

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“We have unique capability in harmonizing the needs of both individuals and organizations,” Nadella went on to say. “This is in our DNA. We also deeply care about taking things global and making a difference in lives and organizations in all corners of the planet.”

This is the latest stamp Nadella is putting on the company after he became its chief executive in February 2014. Five months later, Nadella declared that “at our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”

That’s different from the focus former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer described in the One Microsoft memo in July 2013: “Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most,” he wrote.

Today, Nadella identified three areas of investment going forward that he described as “interconnected”:

• Reinvent productivity and business processes
• Build the intelligent cloud platform
• Create more personal computing

“We will also extend our experience footprint by building more business process experiences, integrated into content authoring and consumption, communication and collaboration tools,” Nadella wrote. Microsoft’s “experiences” will all depend, Nadella wrote, on Microsoft’s growing cloud. And “we will build the best instantiation of this vision through our Windows device platform and our devices,” he wrote.

Gaming will not be absent from all this.

“We will bring together Xbox Live and our first-party gaming efforts across PC, console, mobile and new categories like HoloLens into one integrated play,” Nadella wrote.

The full text of the memo is below, by way of GeekWire:

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Team,

I believe that we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively. Last week I shared how we are aligning our structure to our strategy. Today, I want to share more on the overall context and connective tissue between our mission, worldview, strategy and culture. It is critical that we start the new fiscal year with this shared vision on what we can do and who we want to become.

Mission. Every great company has an enduring mission. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I’m proud to share that this is our new official mission statement. This mission is ambitious and at the core of what our customers deeply care about. We have unique capability in harmonizing the needs of both individuals and organizations. This is in our DNA. We also deeply care about taking things global and making a difference in lives and organizations in all corners of the planet.

Worldview. We must always ground our mission in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world. It’s important to note that our worldview for mobile-first is not just about the mobility of devices; it’s centered on the mobility of experiences that, in turn, are orchestrated by the cloud. That is why we think of these two trends together. What we do with our products and business models has to account for this fundamental transformation.

Strategy and ambitions. Our strategy is to build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Our platforms will harmonize the interests of end users, developers and IT better than any competing ecosystem or platform. We will realize our mission and strategy by investing in three interconnected and bold ambitions.

1. Reinvent productivity and business processes
2. Build the intelligent cloud platform
3. Create more personal computing

These ambitions utilize a unique set of assets that span productivity services, cloud platform, our device platform and our family of devices. There is an explicit path dependence on how we achieve the “inter-connectedness” between the various elements of our strategy to gain momentum.

· First, we will reinvent productivity services for digital work that span all devices. We will also extend our experience footprint by building more business process experiences, integrated into content authoring and consumption, communication and collaboration tools. We will drive scale and usage by appealing to “dual-use” customers, providing productivity services that enable them to accomplish more at work and in the rest of their life activities with other people.

· Second, all these experiences will be powered by our cloud platform — a cloud that provides our customers faster time to value, improved agility and cost reduction, and solutions that differentiate their business. We’ll further provide a powerful extensibility model that is attractive to third-party developers and enterprises. This in turn enables us to attract applications to our cloud platform and attach our differentiated capabilities such as identity management, rich data management, machine learning and advanced analytics.

· Finally, we will build the best instantiation of this vision through our Windows device platform and our devices, which will serve to delight our customers, increase distribution of our services, drive gross margin, enable fundamentally new product categories, and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly. We will pursue our gaming ambition as part of this broader vision for Windows and increase its appeal to consumers. We will bring together Xbox Live and our first-party gaming efforts across PC, console, mobile and new categories like HoloLens into one integrated play.

Strength across all the ambitions enables us to deliver high value to our customers while providing us with the ability to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.

Culture. Perhaps the most important driver of success is culture. Over the past year, we’ve challenged ourselves to think about our core mission, our soul — what would be lost if we disappeared. That work resulted in the mission, strategy and ambitions articulated above. However, we also asked ourselves, what culture do we want to foster that will enable us to achieve these goals?

We fundamentally believe that we need a culture founded in a growth mindset. It starts with a belief that everyone can grow and develop; that potential is nurtured, not predetermined; and that anyone can change their mindset. Leadership is about bringing out the best in people, where everyone is bringing their A game and finding deep meaning in their work. We need to be always learning and insatiably curious. We need to be willing to lean in to uncertainty, take risks and move quickly when we make mistakes, recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. And we need to be open to the ideas of others, where the success of others does not diminish our own.

We have the opportunity to exercise our growth mindset every day in three distinct areas:

· Customer-obsessed. We will learn about our customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring solutions that meet their needs. We will be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that knowledge into Microsoft, while still innovating to surprise and delight our users.

· Diverse and inclusive. The world is diverse. We will better serve everyone on the planet by representing everyone on the planet. We will be open to learning our own biases and changing our behaviors so we can tap into the collective power of everyone at Microsoft. We don’t just value differences, we seek them out, we invite them in. And as a result, our ideas are better, our products are better and our customers are better served.

· One Microsoft. We are a family of individuals united by a single, shared mission. It’s our ability to work together that makes our dreams believable and, ultimately, achievable. We will build on the ideas of others and collaborate across boundaries to bring the best of Microsoft to our customers as one. We are proud to be part of team Microsoft.

If we do all of this, we will achieve our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet. Beyond that, we will make a difference and find deep meaning in our work. We stand in awe of what humans dare to achieve, and we are motivated every day to empower others to achieve more through our technology and innovation.

When we come together as a team, with our exceptional talent and the mindset of a learner, we will grow as individuals, we will grow as a team, we will grow with our customers and partners, we will grow our opportunity, and we will grow our business going forward. And, ultimately, we will grow the impact we have in the world.

We’ve already started this evolution with things like OneWeek and Hackathon, customer feedback loops, our focus on usage in the engineering teams, our performance review model, as well as our diversity and inclusion efforts including the new unconscious bias training. We will do more and more to support the culture we have and recognize impact when we see it.

A good example of our culture in action right now is the work around Windows. We have approached Windows 10 with a growth mindset and obsession for our customers. We have the opportunity to connect with 1.5 billion Windows customers in 190 countries around the globe. We aspire to move people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. … Certainly we want to upgrade as many of our current Windows 7 and 8.1 customers to Windows 10 as possible through our free upgrade offer. More than that, though, we see this as an opportunity to support and celebrate how people and communities upgrade their world every day. To that end, starting on July 29 when Windows 10 becomes available, employees are invited to volunteer some time and upgrade their communities as part of the broader movement. More details will be available in the coming weeks — our hope is that not only our employees, but customers and partners as well, will get involved and be inspired. Together, we can make a big difference in our world.

I believe that culture is not static. It evolves every day based on the behaviors of everyone in the organization. We are in an incredible position to seize new growth this year. We will need to innovate in new areas, execute against our plans, make some tough choices in areas where things are not working and solve hard problems in ways that drive customer value. I really do believe that we can achieve magical things when we come together as one team and focus. I’m looking forward to what we can achieve together in FY16.

Satya